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THE STORY OF 
JEANNE D'ARC 



HEROES OF ALL TIME 



FIRST VOLUMES 



Alexander the Great. By Ada Russell, M.A. 
(Vict.) 

Augustus. By Ren^ Francis, B.A. 

Alfred the Great. By A. E. McKilliam, M.A. 

Jeanne d'Arc. By E. M. Wilmot-Buxton, 
F.R.Hist.S. 

Sir Walter Raleigh. By Beatrice Marshall. 

William the Silent. By A. M. Miall. 



Other volumes in active preparation 



:w.. 




"jEANNE AND THE DAUPHIN " — Pa^e 61 



JEANNE D'ARC 



BY 



E7 M. WILMOT-BUXTON F.R.Hist.S. 

AUTHOR OF 
"STOEIES FROM THE OLD FRENCH ROMANCES" 



With Frontispiece in Color and Eight 
Black-and-White Illustrations 




NEW YORK 

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



J]C 103 



Copyright, 1914, by 
Frederick A. Stokes Company 



All Rights Reserved 



August, 1914 



AUG 22 1914 

^CI,A379218 



Contents 



CHAPTER 
I. 


The Fall of France 






, 


PAGE 

9 


II. 


The Maid of Domremt . 








26 


III. 


The Call 








33 


IV. 


The Maid Obeys . . . . 








40 


V. 


The Journey Begun 








49 


VI. 


At Poitiers . . . . . 






• 


55 


VII. 


At Orleans ... 








68 


VIII. 


The Siege of Orleans . 








77 


IX. 


The Chasse de Pathay . 








. 88 


X. 


The Coronation at Rheims . 








. 97 


XI. 


The Siege of Paris. 








. 104 


XII. 


Inaction and Failure 








. 114 


XIII. 


The Last Fight 








. 123 


XIV. 


The Maid in Captivity . 








. 133 


XV. 


The Public Trial . 








. 143 


XVI. 


The Examination in the Prison 








. 156 


XVII. 


The ' Abjuration' of Jeanne . 








. 164 


XVIII. 


In Rouen Market-place. 








. 179 


XIX. 


In After-days 

5 








. 184 



Illustrations 

Jeanne and the Dauphin ..... Frontisj)iece v 

PAGE 

The Call . . 36 i^ 

Before the Altar . . . . . . . . 74 "^ 

'In God's Name, Forward! ...... 84 

Jeanne Wounded Before Paris . . . . . .110 

On the Road to Margnt ....... 130 ^ 

Jeanne's Attempt to Escape From Beaurevoir . . . 138 ^ 

The Trial 151 '^' 

/ 
In Rouen Market-place , . . . . . . 182 ' 

Map to Illustrate Campaign, Etc. . . . . . 192 ""^ 



TEE MAID 

Thunder of riotous hoofs over the quaking sod; 

Clash of reeking squadrons, steel-capped, iron-shod; 

The White Maid and the white horse, and the flapping banner of God. 

Black hearts riding for money; red hearts riding for fame; 

The Maid who rides for France and the King who rides for shame — 

Gentlemen, fools, and a saint riding in Christ's high Name! 

"Dust to dust!" it is written. Wind-scattered are lance and bow. 

Dust, the Cross of St. George; dust the banner of snow. 

The bones of the King are crumbled, and rotted the shafts of the foe. 

Forgotten, the young knight's valour; forgotten, the captain s skill; 
Forgotten, the fear and the hate and the mailed hands raised to kill; 
Forgotten, the shields that clashed and the arrows that cried so shrill. 

Like a story from some old book, that battle of long ago : 

Shadows, the poor French King and the might of his English foe; 

Shadows, the charging nobles, and the archers kneeling a-row — 

But a flame in my heart and my eyes, the Maid with her banner of snowl 

Theodore Roberts 
By permission of the Editor of the "Pall Mall Magazine." 



La Gloire est morte 

CHAPTER I: The Fall of France 
1350-1400 

IN the great gallery of Versailles stands the 
white marble figure of a maiden, young and 
slender in her knightly armour, her peaked 
face bent pensively earthward, a sword hilt clasped 
between her strong young hands. 

It is Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of France, a figure 
startling in its almost childish simplicity, but by 
which the fifteenth century is dominated as com- 
pletely as is the thirteenth by St. Francis of Assisi 
or the early part of the nineteenth by Napoleon 
Buonaparte. 

Yet for how short a time did the vision of the 
Maid flash forth upon the startled and incredulous 
eyes of France. 

A little more than a year saw her task accom- 
plished, her reputation won and lost, her story told. 
And when we realize that the task set before her 
of saving her country from complete domination 
by a foreign power was carried out to its successful 
issue by a girl — a mere child, for she was only nine- 
teen years of age when she was called upon to die — it 
will be hard indeed to deny the fact that in her we 
see one of the most striking marvels in history. 

In vain does a modern compatriot of the Maid^ 
try to belittle her, treating her achievements as the 
result of a mixture of good fortune and sound common 

J M. Anatole France. 

9 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

sense, and with odd inconsistency her visions as the 
fancies of a neurotic girl. If that be so, as another 
critic^ has remarked, "the marvel becomes a miracle, 
and the miracle has to be explained away. " For the 
fact remains that this untaught peasant maiden, 
at an age when most girls of to-day would, according 
to their position, be just leaving school, or looking 
out for 'a place as under-nurserymaid, proved herself 
the equal of warriors and politicians, led armies 
largely disaffected to victory, worsted her foes by 
her superior military tactics, and ultimately saved 
France from downfall and subjection. 

To understand fully the conditions under which 
this amazing task was accomplished we must try 
to get a clear idea of the state of the country for 
which Jeanne the Maid laid down her life. We must 
take ourselves in imagination back to the latter 
years of the fourteenth century, long before the 
little Maid first opened her dark eyes upon her 
"sweet land of France," in order to understand 
the urgency of her call and the greatness of her 
achievement. 

The last quarter of the fourteenth century was a 
time of unrest and revolt throughout the whole of 
Western Europe. In Italy, in France, in Germany, 
in England, a spirit of discontent with the ruling 
powers, of demand for more equal distribution of 
the goods of this world, of rebellion against the spell 
of servitude which the Feudal System had cast over 
the "common folk," as Froissart calls them, was 
moving upon the face of the whole land. In England 
it led to the Peasants' Revolt under Wat Tyler; in 

' Andrew Lang. 
10 



The Fall of France 

France to the outbreak known as the Jacquerie; 
in Germany to the society named in scorn "The 
Beghards." 

Such upheavals are no doubt necessary from time 
to time, if only to maintain the balance of justice 
between man and man; but the actual period in 
which they occur is invariably one of acute misery 
and suffering for the poor and weak, and their 
immediate consequences are, as a rule, far from 
beneficial to any class of society. 

The extraordinary event which marked the closing 
years of Charles V of France had much to do with 
this condition of unrest and unsettlement. The most 
stable fact in Europe, for the last thousand years, 
had been the position of the Pope, the successor 
of St. Peter, as Head of the Holy Catholic Church 
throughout Christendom. To Rome turned the 
eyes of all men; for there, in the Pontiff's chair, 
sat not only the spiritual Head of the Church, but a 
great temporal ruler, swaying the minds of kings. 
Early in the fourteenth century, however, when 
Pope Clement had fallen a prisoner into the hands 
of Philip IV of France, this vast power had been 
shaken to its foundations, and for seventy years the 
popes were forced to hold their court at the French 
city of Avignon instead of at Rome, and to bow 
to the will of the kings of France. This was a terrible 
blow to the dignity and reputation of the Papacy, 
but worse was to come. 

In 1378 the "Great Schism of the West" divided 
Europe into two hostile camps; for one Pope ruled 
in Rome and claimed the allegiance of the Catholic 
Church, and another at Avignon made the same 

II 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

claim, while acting merely as the puppet of the 
French king. The unity of the Church seemed 
threatened; and all Christendom stood aghast at 
the spectacle of France, Scotland, and the little 
kingdoms of Castile and Naples supporting the 
worldly and self-seeking Clement VII at Avignon; 
while Northern Italy, Germany, England, and most 
of the Northern States of Europe acknowledged 
the supremacy of Urban VI as he wielded his stern 
sceptre from the seat of St Peter at Rome. 

While this strange state of affairs was shaking the 
foundations of Europe and causing terrible scandal 
to the Faith, the death of Charles V in 1380 placed 
the crown of France upon the head of a handsome 
boy of eleven years old, who was, through little 
fault of his own, to bring ruin and desolation upon 
his country. With grim foreboding of this fact, 
his father had said to the boy's uncles, the Dukes 
of Berri and Burgundy, and Bourbon, brother to 
the Queen, "In you I put my whole confidence; the 
boy is young and fickle-minded, and there is much 
need that he should be guided and governed by 
good teaching." But in those days such a thing as 
loyalty to a boy ruler did not exist. The one aim of 
Burgundy was to secure the important domain of 
Flanders and thus make himself undisputed ruler 
of the whole of Northern and Eastern France. Berri 
cared only for the coarse pleasures obtained with the 
money he wrung from the peasants of the South; 
Bourbon counted for nothing in the scale of right; 
Anjou, eldest of the late king's brothers, was a 
man of vast ambition, whose determination to win 
for himself the kingdom of Naples and Sicily kept 

12 



The Fall of France 

him out of France during most of the coming 
period. 

The frequent quarrels of these "Princes of the 
Lihes," the greed with which they grasped at the 
treasure, plate and jewels of their late brother, and 
the eagerness with which each determined to make 
himself supreme in one part or another of France, 
boded ill for a reign of peace and unity; and the 
boy-King, Charles VI, found himself, from the first, 
overwhelmed in a maze of intrigues, revolts and petty 
wars. When Flanders, under the brave Philip van 
Arteveldt, struck a plucky blow for freedom from 
the yoke of Burgundy, the young King was induced 
to march against him; and the crushing vengeance 
dealt, after the fall of Philip, to the most industrious 
and peaceful of the subjects of the French crown, 
marked only too clearly the survival of the old bad 
spirit of the feudal lord towards his inferior. 

Almost at the same moment, Paris and other 
leading cities of France had seized the chance to 
revolt against the ever-growing burden of taxation, 
but the triumph of Charles in Flanders put an end 
to all hope of redress. Dismay fell upon the citizens 
as they bowed their necks under the foot of the 
conquering nobles, who proceeded to make their 
burdens even heavier than before. 

These events of the beginning of the reign were 
typical of the rest. Yet the character of the young 
King was not unattractive. One historian calls 
him "benign and gentle," and says he tried to shelter 
the conquered citizens from the horrible vengeance 
wreaked on them by Burgundy. But, as his father 
had said, he was "fickle-minded," fond of pleasure 

13 



The Story of Jeanne d^Arc 

and self-indulgence, shirking the responsibility of a 
right judgment and the duties it entailed; and 
when this volatile lad of sixteen married the fourteen- 
year-old Isabel of Bavaria, a pretty child who was 
fated in future years to be the evil genius of the 
land, the fates that frowned on France in the four- 
teenth century had almost done their worst. 

Yet- the people believed in their young King with 
touching loyalty, putting down to the account of the 
regent uncles all such mistakes as the dismal failure 
of an expedition against England in 1386, and an 
equally dismal attempt upon th^ Rhine borders 
of Germany. 

They rejoiced therefore when Charles, in his nine- 
teenth year, being at Rheims, the religious capital 
and the ancient coronation place of the French 
kings, suddenly threw off the yoke of the Dukes of 
the Lilies, dismissing them "right well and graciously, 
with many thanks for the trouble and toil they had 
had with him and with the realm. " 

The fact that he proceeded to choose his counsellors 
from his father's old friends, making Oliver Clisson 
Constable of France, did not sweeten the bitterness 
of dismissal to the royal uncles, who went off, Berri 
to the South, Burgundy to his own province, breath- 
ing ill-content and hostility with every breath they 
drew. 

The Duke of Berri, indeed, had soon good cause 
to show his wrath in the open; for the King, in a 
brief fit of anxiety to relieve his long-suffering people 
from the shameful burdens placed upon them by 
the Duke, deposed his uncle and made him thence- 
forth his bitter enemy. 

14 



The Fall of France 

Meantime, however, there was coming upon 
Charles a dark hour destined to exact a penalty for 
his weakness and self-indulgence that more than 
avenged the irate Duke of Berri. 

A certain Peter Craon, a follower of the Duke of 
Orleans, brother to the King, had been dismissed 
from Court by the wish of Clisson, the Constable. 
In revenge this man awaited Clisson on the high- 
way one dark night, set upon him and left him for 
dead in the wayside ditch. News of this was carried 
to the King's bedside by one of the men-at-arms 
of the unfortunate Constable, and Charles hastened 
there and then to find his body. Clisson, however, 
though sorely hurt, was already beginning to recover; 
he was able to denounce his assassin by name, and 
upon Craon Charles vowed a deadly vengeance. 
Craon, however, had fled to the Duke of Brittany, 
who promptly showed his contempt for the Crown 
by refusing to give him up. The King's uncles 
advised him to drop the matter; Clisson and his 
friends were bent on vengeance; and forthwith the 
King, feverish and uncertain in health, and against 
the advice of the physicians, set out with his army 
against the rebellious Duke in a very hot August. 

No doubt he brooded secretly on the wrong done 
to his friend; no doubt also his self-indulgent life 
had sown the seeds of mind trouble, for as he rode 
along under a hot summer sun, he was unreasonably 
startled by the appearance of a wild-eyed man, some 
wandering lunatic, who rushed from the woods to 
seize his bridle and to cry aloud, "Go no further; 
you are betrayed to your enemies!" 

The man was driven off, no one paid much heed 

15 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

to the white face and staring eyes of the King, and 
the cavalcade moved on again. Suddenly, as the 
heat grew stronger, a page who rode just behind him 
dozed and nodded, letting his spear fall with a 
rattle on the helmet of another who rode close by. 
At the clatter the King's nerve suddenly gave way. 
With a shriek of "Treason!" he drew his sword, 
and before he could be hindered, had slain four of 
his company. He had quite suddenly become a 
madman, and though there were times when he re- 
turned to something resembling sanity, he was never 
again entirely responsible for the government of his 
country 

Thus was the doom of France sealed for the next 
fifty years; for, in the hands of a wicked Queen, 
selfish and scheming princes and ambitious adven- 
turers, all sense of unity and cohesion was gradually 
lost, and the land was left at the mercy of a foreign 
invader. 

With one Pope at Rome and another at Avignon, 
the bond of religious faith, generally the strongest 
of all to bind a country together, was fast weakening; 
and even the well-meant efforts of Charles, in one of 
his more lucid intervals, to put an end to the schism 
by forcing the French Poj)e to abdicate only seemed 
to make matters worse. For France at once split 
up into definite parties on that very question. The 
Duke of Orleans and his followers supported him 
of Avignon, the Duke of Burgundy held with the 
King that both popes should abdicate, and a third 
be elected to fill the papal seat at Rome. 
|, These two great parties, the Orleanists or Ar- 
magnacs in the South, and the Burgundians in 

i6 



The Fall of France 

the North and East, began steadily to increase in 
the fierceness of their rivalry. 

A truce of twenty-eight years had been made with 
England after the marriage of Richard II with 
the little French princess, Isabel, and this might 
have given the country an opportunity of recovering 
after the long nightmare of the Hundred Years 
War. But with no strong ruler at the head of 
affairs, with a Queen to whom her subjects merely 
represented a means of obtaining money for her 
scandalous amusements, and who was supported 
by the 'aristocratic' party of Orleans, France had 
no chance. 

For even Burgundy, who had some slight preten- 
sions to be considered the 'friend of the people,' 
went to the wall at this time in a wild crusade against 
the Ottoman Turks, failing after a fashion that for 
a time completely crushed his party and left all 
power in the hands of the Court — that is, with the 
Queen and the Duke of Orleans. 

And so the gloomy story progresses. On the 
one hand we see the poor mad King amusing himself 
with the cards said to have been invented for his 
diversion; on the other the grim game played by 
the rival parties, Burgundian against Armagnac, 
Berri and Bourbon now against one of these, now 
against each other. The Queen keeps mad revel 
at her wicked Court; the faces of the peasants are 
ground that the money may be forthcoming. 

When Philip of Burgundy died, his son, John the 
Fearless, took up the quarrel, posing, as his father 
had done, as the Friend of the People, and the ally 
of England. 

17 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

For a time he carried all before him, and even 
the Queen and the Duke of Orleans were compelled 
to acknowledge him as the head of the governing 
powers. A kind of truce between the two rivals 
was patched up, and partly owing to Berri's good 
offices, they so far became reconciled as to appear 
publicly at Mass together. But within a week 
Orleans had been foully murdered by a follower of 
the Duke of Burgundy; and the strange part of the 
matter is that this black deed was condoned by 
the Church and approved by all Paris, and even by 
the muddled brain of the victim's brother, the poor 
mad King himself. 

The feud was taken up by the young sons of 
the murdered prince, who henceforth represent not 
only the aristocratic faction, but what we may call 
the national party in France. They were bitterly 
opposed by the Burgundians, representing the 
citizen element and the English alliance, who still 
held Paris; so there now commenced what was 
practically a civil war between the two factions. 
Sometimes a truce was patched up, and the two 
dukes appeared before their troops both riding the 
same horse in token of that fact. More often the con- 
flict was waged to the death; sometimes Burgundy 
was worsted and fled to his own domain; sometimes 
the Armagnacs, on whose side we now find that 
weak-faced lad, the Dauphin, gave way before the 
onslaught of the Burgundians and their supporters. 

Finally, as far as this period is concerned, a treaty 
signed at Arras drove the latter to the wall; and 
the wretched young Prince, who was to hand on 
to his country the fruit of the legacy of vice be- 



The Fall of France 

queathed by his mother to himself, made himself 
ruler of Paris with the aid of the party of Orleans. 

Now there succeeded to the throne of England 
about that time (1413-1414) a certain young King 
whose keen eyes saw the weakness and the shoddy 
character of the man who called himself Regent of 
France. It did not need the insulting present of 
tennis balls to decide Henry V to revive the claim 
his great-grandfather had made upon that country. 
What better moment could he choose than now, 
when a mad King in name, a dissolute Prince in fact, 
ruled over a land torn in pieces by internal strife, 
crushed by taxation, weakened by long years of 
misgovernment ? 

In the war that followed every natural advantage 
lay with the French. As an English chronicle of 
that day says of the march from Harfleur to Calais, 
*' Bridges and causeways are broken everywhere; 
the pomp of the French grows and swells. The 
King (Henry V) has scarce eight days' food; the 
French destroy farms, wine and victuals. They 
sought to weary the people out with hunger and 
thirst. " 

Yet the result of this weary march was the tre- 
mendous victory of Agincourt, in which the Armag- 
nacs had been so confident of success that they had 
refused with scorn the offer of the Burgundians to 
help them in the struggle, as well as the well-meant 
attempt of the burghers of Paris to support their 
cause. 

The victory struck a deadly blow at the party of 
Orleans; but in the interval of two years that elapsed 
before Henry V was able to follow up his success, 

19 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

the old feud broke out again with fresh bitterness. 
John the Fearless was in reahty a weak fellow 
enough, never able to hold an advantage he had 
won; the Armagnacs held the person of the King 
and of his son. 

About this time the wretched Dauphin, worn 
out by wickedness, died; and within a few months, 
his next brother, a friend to Burgundy, also passed 
away with suspicious suddenness. For those were 
the days when the gift of a pair of gloves often 
meant death by poison to the wearer, and when 
the food and drink of princes had to be tested by 
underlings before it was safe for them to partake. 

These events made Charles, a boy of fourteen, 
Dauphin of France. He was a devoted Armagnac, 
and the Duke of Orleans soon found himself at the 
head of the Government. Meantime the infamous 
Queen Isabel was driven out of Paris by her own 
son, and exiled; and in her exile she was sought 
out by the Duke of Burgundy, eager to establish 
a rival claim, and declared by him to be Regent 
of France. Together they set up a Parliament 
at Poitiers, declaring that the Parliament of Paris 
was dissolved, and forthwith sent spies to tamper 
with the citizens of the latter city and to make 
traitors to the cause of Orleans. 

Within a short time Paris had rebelled against the 
strict hand of its new ruler; the Armagnacs were 
massacred in the streets, the poor mad King led out 
as though he were on the side of the successful 
Burgundians; while the Dauphin narrowly escaped 
and fled to Melun from the Bastille, where he had 
been shut up by his friends for safety. 

20 



The Fall of France 

Still more fiercely raged the feud, while the Bur- 
gundians held Paris, and the Dauphin with the 
Armagnac remnant carried on a disheartened kind 
of civil war against them. 

This was the opportunity for Henry of England 
to descend once more upon the distracted country. 
The Duke of Burgundy, together with the Dukes of 
Anjou and Brittany, at once played false to his 
country by signing a 'treaty of neutrality' with 
him, and looked on, helpless and inactive, while 
Henry besieged his chief town, Rouen. Rouen fell, 
and the English King moved on to Paris; and then 
it began to dawn on the rival factions that France, 
as an independent kingdom, would soon be lost if 
nothing effective was done. 

Thereupon an attempt was made to patch up a 
reconciliation between the representatives of the two 
great parties, and the old Duke of Burgundy was 
invited by the boy Dauphin to meet him on the 
Bridge of Montereau and endeavour to come to 
terms. 

The greatest precautions were taken against 
treachery. A partition was erected, and the leaders 
were to speak through a hole in the same; but John 
of Burgundy, impetuous even in his old age, stepped 
over the barrier and knelt at the feet of the young 
Prince. Immediately he was cut down by a blow 
from Duchatel, one of the chiefs of the Orleanists, 
and fell dead upon the bridge. 

This treacherous and stupid act sealed the fate of 
France at that time. It made the new Duke Philip 
the implacable foe of the Armagnacs, and hence the 
ally of Henry. It turned the Duke of Brittany^ 

21 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

who had also met with treachery at their hands, dead 
against them, while the Queen was more violently 
opposed than ever both to her son and his supporters. 
Hence it was not difficult for these powerful foes to 
convince the country that the rule of the Englishmen, 
even though it made France but a province of Eng- 
land, was better than government by a weak, cruel 
and treacherous young Prince of their own race. 

So with little difficulty Henry V arranged the 
Treaty of Troyes in 1420, by which the English King 
was declared Regent and heir of France after the 
death of the imbecile King Charles, and was to marry 
forthwith the Princess Catherine, his daughter. 

All Northern France, either by pressure brought by 
the army within its borders, or because it hoped that 
then the long strife might end, agreed to this arrange- 
ment and gave its allegiance to Henry and the 
Burgundians. But south of the Loire the national 
spu'it remained alive; and there the Dauphin, sup- 
ported by the Armagnacs, now the representatives 
of the National party, and by bands of Scottish "free 
lances, " was acclaimed as the true heir of Charles VI. 
Even the men of the South, who had suffered in 
former days under the hands of this very faction, 
gave in their allegiance for the sake of preserving the 
nation from foreign rule. 

Just before his end in 1422, the victorious Henry 
approached Orleans, the chief centre of this opposi- 
tion to his rule, and threatened to besiege it. But 
death put a stop to this attempt; and the decease of 
the unhappy Charles of France some few weeks later 
left the crown in the weak hands of a baby English 
Prince of nine months old. 

22 



The Fall of France 

"Long live King Henry of France and England!" 
shouted the men of the North as the body of King 
Charles was hastily interred in the cathedral of St 
Denis. 

The echoes of that strange cry reached the banks of 
the Loire, bearing hopeless dismay to the heart of the 
spiritless young Dauphin, who, almost against his 
will, was proclaimed King forthwith in the chapel of 
Mehun (1422). 

A finer character would, at this juncture, have 
played the man and made a desperate bid for the 
recovery of the North of France; for the English 
cause, wholly dependent as it was upon the alliance 
of Burgundy, was far from strong, in reality, at this 
time. 

But Charles VII was to be no hero-King. The 
utmost that can be said for him by his warmest 
adherents is that he was "a handsome prince, well- 
languaged and full of pity for the poor, with a very 
sincere piety. '* He had no initiative, no will to do 
the right thing at any cost. Indolent by nature, 
and hating the sight of battlefields, he inherited his 
father's weak mind, his mother's love of luxury 
and ease. 

In after days, only one voice was raised in defence 
of a King who was accused of "always wishing to 
hide from his people in castles and holes and corners"; 
and that was the voice of the little Maid who was to 
lay down her life for one to whom she had generously 
given the devotion of her innocent heart. 

At this time, however, Jeanne was a ten-year child, 
dreaming among the daisied meadows of Domr^my, 
and France was left to rush blindly on her fate. 

The English Duke of Bedford was proclaimed 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

Regent of France, and governed Normandy, Paris 
and the North with an iron hand. South of the Loire 
a civil conflict was raging, and devastating the whole 
country. 

In one battle (Beauje, 1421) the Scottish allies of 
the Dauphin won a victory and slew the Duke of 
Clarence, uncle to the English King. Three years 
later came the almost total extermination of the 
Scots at Verneuil (1424), a defeat which determined 
the Dauphin to risk no more battlefields. From that 
time he wandered listlessly from town to town, where 
he could still count on some measure of loyalty, 
sometimes making empty and languid efforts towards 
negotiations with Burgundy at the pressure of his 
chief partisan, the Archbishop of Rheims. 

For the Dauphin was but a puppet-prince. Com- 
pletely in the hands of the men who had brought 
about the murder of the late Duke of Burgundy 
on that bridge of Montereau, how could he hope to 
accomplish a sound alliance with the murdered man's 
son.f^ Could he have summoned up spirit to banish 
these advisers, de Richemont, Constable of France, 
and son of the Duke of Brittany, would have stood 
his friend and brought about an alliance that would 
have driven the English from France. 

But it was left to de Richemont to get rid of these 
favourites by murder and treachery, without advanc- 
ing any nearer the end in view. He only became an 
object of intense hatred to the Dauphin, who had 
now found a new favourite in de Tremoille. The 
leading characteristic of this man was that he was a 
"double traitor" both to the House of Burgundy, 
in whose employ he had been, and to de Richemont, 

24 



The Fall of France 

who represented the party of the Dauphin; so that 
at the very moment that the Enghsh were preparing 
to take Orleans by storm, the forces of the Prince 
were mider the rival leaderships of the banished 
de Richemont and de Tremoille. 

This, then, was the problem which had to be dealt 
with by the future Saviour of France: a country 
weakened by fifty years of faction and civil war, torn 
asunder by a foreign invader, as well as by internal 
strife; possessing no leader of note, no sovereign 
capable of inspiring a loyal devotion to his cause; 
with an army ill-trained, disaffected and disheartened 
by recent failure; a country, lastly, whose central 
point, the city of Orleans, was so sorely threatened 
by the English that it seemed as though the 'key 
of the South' would shortly fall into the foeman's 
hands. 



25 



La grande pitie quHl 
y avail au royaume 
de France (Les Voix) 

CHAPTER II: TheMaidof 
Domremy 

THE little village of Domremy lies on the 
banks of the Upper Meuse, the river that 
forms the boundary between France and 
the Duchy of Lorraine. 

It must have always been a straggling little place, 
surrounded by hills and oak forests, but itself lying 
low, with meadows apt to be swamped by the autumn 
overflow of the river, and vineyards sloping gently 
back to the rising ground in the distance. 

Just across the river, the rival village of Maxey 
stood firm for the Burgundians and for the English 
King; and no doubt the children of Domremy often 
reproduced the strife that was raging in France, 
when they went forth armed with stones and sticks 
'for the cause of the King' to strike a blow at the 
'traitors' of Maxey, the boys and girls across the 
water. 

Higher up the Meuse stood the walled city of 
Vaucouleurs, the capital of the district, held at that 
time for the Dauphin by the Seigneur, Robert de 
Baudricourt, who was to play no unimportant part 
in the history of Jeanne. 

Here, then, in this outlying corner of the champagne 
district, lived the worthy peasant-farmer, Jacques 
d'Arc, a good, steady, unimaginative man, whole- 
hearted in his care for his little family and for the 
horses and sheep and pigs which he owned. It 

26 



The Maid of Domr^my 

was he who, first among the villagers, saw the 
advantage of renting, together with six others, 
that curious place known as the "Castle of the 
Island" for the protection of families and cattle in 
case of attack from Burgundian or English foes. 

A deserted feudal castle, surrounded by a wonderful 
old garden and a deep moat, was no bad playground 
for an imaginative child; and little did stolid 
Jacques d'Arc reck of the dreams that were dreamed 
there by his little daughter Jeanne, while his boys 
Jacques and Jean and Pierre were off and away 
with pockets full of stones wherewith to quell the 
bold spirits of the Maxey lads who stood for the 
cause of the usurper. 

Not that Jeanne was permitted to waste much 
time in day-dreaming in her Castle of the Island. 
She had a good, religious, practical mother, Isambeau 
by name, who, though she saw no need to teach her 
little daughter to read and write, would have her 
busy with skilled needlework, to say nothing of the 
necessity of spinning flax into linen for shirts for her 
father and the boys. When in after days she was 
asked if she had been taught any art or trade, she 
could answer with innocent pride, "Yes, my mother 
taught me to sew and spin, and so well indeed that 
I do not think any lady in Rouen could teach one 
more. " 

One who has visited^ the humble home of the Maid 
in Domremy describes the place as a little grey 
cottage, covered with a wild vine which almost 
hides the primitive carving over the door. But 
there can still be distinguished with difficulty the 

^ Mile de Bazelaire — Figure Exquise.^ 
27 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

narrow escutcheons containing the royal arms of 
France, with the device Vive le Roy Loys; and the 
armorial bearings granted by Charles VII to the 
Maid — a drawn sword of silver, the point of which 
supports a royal crown. 

Within the house is seen the dark and gloomy 
*chambre de famille,' where little Jeanne passed 
many, an hour of her young life in needlework or 
knitting under the eye of her mother. It is sparsely 
furnished, and still retains the austere appearance 
of former days. 

Darker and still more austere is the little room 
beyond, where Jeanne dreamed her girlish dreams 
and slept the healthy sleep of childhood. Formerly 
it served also as the family bakehouse, and the place 
where the oven was built is still visible in the corner 
of the room. 

The cupboard where Jeanne hung her poor little 
peasant's dress is now only a hole in the wall; and 
the room itself has the bareness of a cave, touching 
in its simplicity. 

In these surroundings the child was trained to be 
helpful to her parents and to her neighbours. In 
later years, when these early days of her life under- 
went an examination extraordinarily searching and 
hostile, we have the witness of one Simon, a labourer, 
to the fact that as a child he was nursed in illness 
by the little maid from the cottage of Jacques 
d'Arc, and others told how, when some poor soul 
sought a night's lodging, she was content to lie 
by the hearth and give up her bed to the way- 
farer. "She was such," they said, " that, in a way 
of speaking, all the people of Domremy were fond 

28 



The Maid of Domrimy 

of her." She was certainly, from the first, a deeply 
rehgious Httle maiden. From the days when she 
learnt her Ave and her Paternoster at her mother's 
knee, the ruined chapel of the Castle, the little grey 
village chm"ch, drew the child with cords of love. 

It was said of her that "she often went to church 
»when others went to fdance"; to the church that 
stood so close by her cottage home, and which, for 
her, was full of the memories of saints and angels. 

The building itseK was dedicated to St Remy, 
and so she would be familiar with the story that 
tells how an angel brought the holy oil to the saint, 
by which henceforth every king of France must be 
consecrated at his own city of Rheims. Probably 
from the lips of her mother or from the village curS, 
who must have had a very tender spot for this pious 
little member of his flock, she heard also the story 
of St Margaret and St Catherine, with whose images 
she was familiar in the church; and she had also a 
special devotion to St Michael the Archangel, a 
favourite saint in France, for to him belonged that 
great castle in Normandy of which every child had 
heard, since it was one of the few that yet held out 
against the English. 

With these and other saints did Jeanne hold con- 
verse, and to them she paid her little devotions just 
as Catholic children have always done; and be- 
yond the fact that she loved more than the rest to 
hear the bell ring for daily Mass and left the dance 
gladly to go and pray in church, she was no more 
devout or mystically inclined than most little Cath- 
olic maids of eleven or twelve. Simple homely 
work, simple homely faith, those were the chief 

29 



The Story of Jeanne d^Arc 

influences that touclied the early hfe of the Maid 
of France at this time. 

Gradually, however, other impressions began to 
overshadow her young soul. Through the village 
troops of soldiers on their way to garrison duty at 
Vaucouleurs during the active season of the war, or 
preparing to give their forty days' service, must have 
passed from time to time. Sometimes, too, their 
fierce neighbours, the Duke of Lorraine and the 
Damoiseau de Commercy, made plundering raids 
upon these peaceful villages on the banks of the 
Meuse. On one of these Jeanne said that "she helped 
well in driving the beasts from and^ to the island 
castle, named the Island, for fear of the men-at-arms. " 

Then faces, once familiar in Domremy, began to 
disappear and be seen again no more. *'He is gone 
to the war." "He was killed in the siege"; such 
sayings fell not unheeded on the ears of the Maid, 
as she noted the absence of here a cousin and there 
a friend. Once at least the cattle of the village 
were driven off by a marauder, and though they 
were recovered, such an exciting event for quiet 
Domremy would have had a marked effect upon a 
sensitive, intelligent child, who at that time had 
already received, as far as we can judge, a strange 
mysterious message from an unknown source. 
"What is the war about?" She must have asked 
the question long ere this; and from whatever 
quarter the answer came, whether from father or 
mother, village priest or wandering friar, the effect 
of the story must have been to have raised an ever- 
increasing "pity for the fair realm of France" in 
the simple, innocent heart of little Jeanne. 

30 



The Maid of Domr^my 

One other influence of her early days must be 
noticed, since of it her enemies strove to make 
such evil use in days to come. Within sight of 
her doorstep was the gloomy Oak Forest, the home 
of wolves, said to be haunted by fairies, not always 
*good folk,' but more like the 'dark ladye' who 
brought ill-luck to all her lovers. 

Legend, vague and obscure enough, based upon a 
prophecy of the ancient seer Merlin, said that from 
the Oak Wood should come a marvellous maid for 
the healing of the nations; and some years before 
the birth of Jeanne this had crystallized into a 
prophecy, more detached and precise, to the effect 
that "A maid who is to restore France, ruined by a 
woman, shall come from the marches of Lorraine. ' ' 
The reference to the 'woman' is, of course, to the 
wicked Isabel, wife of Charles VI., and this popular 
version was common property among the whole 
neighbourhood. 

Now some would have it that in this prophecy 
we have the whole source of the 'suggestion' that 
inspired the Maid to go forth on her mission; and 
such folk would see that dark Oak Wood constantly 
haunted by the presence of the Maid, would even 
see her influenced by the powers of witchcraft, said 
to pervade its gloomy shades. 

But apart from the fact that on her own asser- 
tion Jeanne, though she knew the popular version 
given above, never heard of the Merlin prophecy of 
the 'Oak Wood' till it was told her ajter she had 
begun her task, we have plenty of witnesses to the 
fact that the wood had no fascination for the girl. 
Perhaps she was too well satisfied with the mystical 

31 



The Story of Jeanne d^Arc 

company of saints and angels, which were the daily 
intimates of every devout Catholic child, to be 
interested in the tales of fairies and witches which 
attracted more worldly minds. She said in later 
days that she had "heard the talk of these things, 
but she did not believe in it." But since she was 
of a singularly gay and happy nature, and very far 
from being a morbid, introspective damsel, she 
undoubtedly used to join in the May day revels 
about one of these great forest oaks, dancing with 
the merry children round the trunk, and hanging 
garlands on the boughs. *'She never knew there 
were fairies in the wood," she said; and only a dark 
and perverted mind would see in this innocent 
amusement of the child Jeanne anything that could 
possibly be connected with the powers of darkness. 

Rather, her lack of interest goes to prove that 
Jeanne was a normal, healthy-minded child, sensible 
and practical, by no means given to credulous 
fancies; and if she were rather more devout than 
most children of her age, her prayers and love of 
the Sacraments were anything but a hindrance to 
the fulfilment of her daily duties. "She was modest, 
simple, devout," says one who knew her in those 
years, "went gladly to church and to sacred places; 
worked, sewed, hoed in the fields, and did what 
was needful about the house. " 

This, then, was the Hfe of the Maid of Domremy 
until her thirteenth year, up to which time no 
shadow of foreboding as to the extraordinary task 
that lay in front of her seems to have crossed her 
sunny path. 

32 



Jeanne, soyez sage 

et bonne (First Message of 
the Angelic Voice toJeanne) 

CHAPTER III: Th Call. 
1424— 1428 

THE year 1424 opened ill for the land of 
France. It saw a terrible defeat of the 
Dauphin's forces at Verneuil, where his 
brave Scottish allies were slaughtered almost to a 
man; and, though in the months that followed, the 
great houses of Lorraine and Anjou threw in their 
lot with the French rather than with Burgundy, 
there seemed less chance than ever of Charles VII 
being crowned king of France. 

To little Domr^my, on the far borders of Lorraine 
came grim rumours of the state of Northern France, 
where, as we learn, "the open land from the Loire 
to the Somme was a desert overgrown with wood 
and thickets; wolves fought over the corpses in 
the burial grounds of Paris; towns were dis- 
tracted by parties, villages destroyed; the high- 
ways ceased to exist; churches were polluted and 
sacked; castles burnt; commerce at a stand; 
tillage unknown." 

It might indeed have been said by the despairing 
peasants of the country-side, as in the days of our 
own King Stephen, that "God and His Saints were 
asleep," had it not been for very striking evidence 
to the contrary, shown in a revelation of that year 
made, not to the wise men of France, not to the 
great soldiers or the skilled courtiers, but, as once 

33 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

before in the world's history, to the pure vision of a 
Maid. 

It was about the midday hour on one hot summer 
morning that Jeanne d'Arc sat in the garden of her 
father's house, busy at her needlework. The sunny 
air, full of the song of birds and the humming of 
bees, had just vibrated to the sound of the Angelus 
bell rung from the steeple close by; for the garden 
and the churchyard joined, so that Jeanne sat close 
under the shadow of the grey walls. 

Of what was she dreaming as she plied her busy 
needle .f^ No doubt the "long, long thoughts" of 
maidenhood were hers, dim and formless enough, 
and still entwined, perhaps, in her devout young 
soul with memories of *'her brothers the Saints" 
to whom she had prayed at Mass that morning. 
But with them there may have mingled deep 
emotions of pity for the sad condition of her native 
land, and vague, timid longings that one might be 
found, even at this eleventh hour, to come to its 
aid and to cause the uncrowned Dauphin to fulfil 
his destiny as crowned king of France. But where 
was that Helper to come from.f* And how could 
others, she herself perhaps, help, if only a little, to 
mend the great wrong that had come upon the land ? 

Suddenly there falls upon the shady churchyard a 
beam of light; and a mysterious Voice speaks to the 
frightened little Maid. It brings no startling message, 
no sudden call to arms. It is simplicity itself . *' Jeanne, 
sois sage et bonne enfant; va souvent a I'eglise." 
Three times she hears it, and so *' she knows it for the 
voice of an Angel. " Let us hear her own childlike 
account as given to her judges a few years later: 

34 



The Call 

"When I was about thirteen years old I had a 
Voice from God to help me in my conduct. And 
the first time I was in great fear. It came, that 
Voice, about midday, in summer time, in my father's 
garden. " 

Hoping to prove it to be a hallucination due to 
bodily weakness, they asked her if she had fasted 
on the previous day; to which she replied that she 
had not. Asked how she knew the Voice was, as 
she said, "for her soul's health," she replied, "Be- 
cause it told me to be good, and to go often to chm'ch; 
and said that I must go to France. " 

How soon the latter part of the call was given we 
do not know, but as Jeanne said that these Voices 
spoke to her twice or thrice a week it was probably 
not long before the two admonitions became one 
command — the call to prepare herself by a holy life 
for the salvation of her country. 

It was long, however, before the child realized 
that the call was a real actual summons to action. 
The thing seemed impossible. That she, an ignorant 
peasant girl, who had never left her native village, 
could do anything to help the lost realm was too 
incredible for words. 

"Be good!" — yes, she would make that her aim. 
"Go often to church" — to pray for the unhappy 
land — she was prepared for that. But "go to 
France" — how could this thing be.^^ 

Before long, however, the message became yet 
more definite. In the words of one to whom she 
confided the experience in later years, "She, with 
some other girls who were watching the sheep in the 
common meadow, ran a foot race for a bunch of 

35 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

flowers or some such prize. She won so easily and 
ran so fleetly that in the eyes of lookers-on her feet 
did not seem to touch the ground. When the race 
was over, and Jeanne, at the limit of the meadow, 
was, as it were, rapt and distraught, resting and 
recovering herself, there was near her a youth who 
said, 'Jeanne, go home, for your mother says she 
needs you.' Believing it to be her brother or some 
other boy of the neighbourhood, she went home in a 
hurry. 

*'Her mother metand scolded her, asking her why 
she had come home and left her sheep. 

*' 'Did you not send for me.^^' she asked. 

" 'No!' replied her mother. 

*'She was about to return to her playmates, 
believing that some one had played a trick upon her, 
and may indeed have reached the secluded spot 
where the sheep were feeding when 'a bright cloud 
passed before her eyes and from the cloud came a 
voice saying that she must change her course of life 
and do marvellous deeds, for the King of Heaven 
had chosen her to aid the King of France. She 
must wear man's dress, take up arms, be a captain 
in the war, and all would be ordered by her advice. ' " 

The effect of such a call as this upon a normal, 
healthy, yet sensitively religious girl of thirteen can 
be easily imagined. At first blank incredulity, then 
wondering faith, and lastly, humble acquiescence in 
the Will of God. 

By her own account she told no one of the Visions, 
neither mother nor father, nor even the priest to 
whom she made her confession. This is surely no 
matter for surprise. The shrinking from the 

.^6 




"THE CALL" — Page 36 



The Call 

inevitable astonisliment and ridicule of her elders, 
indeed, from the inevitable admonitions to take a 
less exalted view of her lot in life, was natural enough. 
For Jeanne was a very human little maid; and we 
know that when, after the first call, she became much 
more devout, going oftener to church, and deserting 
the dance and the May Tree, she flushed with shame 
and annoyance when the village boys teased her for 
being "unco' good." There must, in fact, have 
been a long struggle in her young mind before she 
could bring herself to accept the call, even while 
she still waited for practical means to fulfil it. For 
three or four years she heard her Voices and almost 
resisted their commands. Even in 1428, when they 
became far more explicit and bade her go to Robert 
de Baudricourt, who would send her with an armed 
escort to raise the siege of Orleans, she replied in 
doubt and distress, "I am but a poor girl, who cannot 
ride or be a leader in war. " 

For these first years, indeed, she seems to have 
been content to listen to her Voices without any 
thought of an immediate summons to action. Not 
always did they appear to her in bodily form — it 
is curious that she persistently speaks of "Mes 
Voix," not of personal apparitions of the Saints, 
though these did actually appear at times. Three 
of them became familiar to her; the first being of 
noble appearance, with wings and a crown on his 
head, who told her many things concerning the sad 
state of France. *' She had great doubts at first 
whether this was St Michael, but afterwards, when 
he had instructed her and shown her many things, 
she firmly beheved that it was he. " From him the 

37 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

message first came very clearly to tlie frightened 
girl. "Jeanne, it is necessary for you to go to the 
help of the King of France; for it is you who shall 
give him back his kingdom. " 

And when the child, trembling before such a 
terrific task, shed tears of humility and fear, he com- 
forted her, saying, "St Catherine and St Margaret 
will come to your aid. " 

Then came the visions of these two women saints, 
whom she "knew because they told her who they 
were. " 

"I saw them," she says "with my bodily eyes 
as clearly as I see you; and when they departed, 
I used to weep and wish they would take me with 
them. " 

Poor little weeping Maid, sad in the thought of 
the high destiny offered to her, ignorant of the means 
to fulfil it, yet never refusing, never closing her ears to 
the call. 

Unbearable indeed might the burden have proved, 
borne as it was in silence and isolation, had it not 
been for the strong religious spirit of the girl. Like 
another Maid of other days, the model to all others, 
she was prepared to say, albeit with shrinking 
heart : 

"Ecce ancllla Domini: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum."^ 

After these Voices made themselves heard, Jeanne 
became still more devout and preoccupied with her 
religion. The village boys laughed at her, but, 
though she flushed with annoyance, she still left 

^ "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to 

Thy word." 

38 



The Call 

the game and the dance to steal away to the quiet 
little church where, perhaps, her Voices sounded 
more clearly than in the garden or on the hill-side. 
No one seems to have suspected anything, nor, beyond 
the fact that Jeanne was 'religious enough for a 
nun,' dreamt that she was contemplating a step 
extraordinary indeed for a simple village girl. For, 
outwardly, she seemed what she was in fact, a strong, 
healthy, sensible maiden, gay and merry enough, 
with happy dark grey eyes and a ready smile for 
every one. Only in solitude were the bright eyes 
sometimes clouded with doubt and dismay; yet, as 
the years passed on, they grew ever clearer and more 
determined as the Voices made more distinct the Call 
from God. 



39 



Adieu, Mengette! 

(Last words of Jeanne to 
her friends at Domr^my) 

CHAPTER IV: TheMaidObeys 
Spring 1428 

IT was some time in the spring of 1428 that 
Jeanne's Voices became more insistent, more 
expHcit. 

^''Go to Messire de Baudricourt, Captain of Vau- 
couleurs, and he will take you to the King.'' 

By this time fear had vanished, giving place to 
quiet confidence; she now awaited only a fitting 
opportunity. Presently this came in the person 
of a cousin, or uncle as she called him, by marriage, 
Durand Lassois, living in Little Burey, close to 
Vaucouleurs, who happened at that time to be paying 
a brief visit to Domr^my. • 

"Take me back with you, uncle," we hear the 
girl saying, hoping thus to obtain some opportunity, 
perchance, of speech with "Messire de Baudricourt." 

This worthy was the great man of the district, a 
bluff, practical soldier, ready enough with his sword 
in the frequent petty wars that ravaged the marches 
of Lorraine, but by no means the kind of man 
to enter with sympathy into the high aims of a 
religious enthusiast. The moment was propitious 
for Jeanne 's timid request to her relative. Durand 's 
wife was in a weak state of health and overburdened 
by household matters, and Jeanne would be of use 
at such a time. Permission was obtained, and the 
two set off together on what was to be, for Durand 
at least, an epoch-making pilgrimage. It was not 

40 



The Maid Obeys 

strange that this kindly rustic should have been 
Jeanne's first confidant, rather than father or 
mother. Those who know us best are not always 
the easiest people to whom to confide our highest 
aspirations, our tenderest hopes. But this good 
fellow had always had a good word for "petite 
Jeanne" of Domr^my, and to him was the first 
revelation made. 

Imagine his astonishment, therefore, when the 
girl at his side, swinging along with her boyish stride, 
announced that "she must go to France to the 
Dauphin, to make him be crowned king." 

Probably he stammered out some words of surprise, 
incredulity, even rebuke; for she next asked him 
calmly, "Did you never hear that France should 
be made desolate by a woman and restored by a 
maid.?" 

The saying was well known to all the country-side, 
and Durand had nothing to say in reply. From 
that time he was a firm, if unwilling, ally of Jeanne. 

At her urgent request he went up to the Chateau 
of Vaucouleurs and interviewed the Seigneur; it 
was quite clear to his rustic intelligence that de 
Baudricourt, apart from the fact that he had been 
actually named by the angel, was the one to take 
the first decisive step in such a matter. 

So he made his way to the hall where the bluff 
soldier sat polishing his good sword, and in 
hesitating speech made his request that he should 
send a peasant maid from Domremy to the Dauphin, 
for the purpose of crowning him king. 

We can imagine the rude stare, the loud laugh, 
and the impatient reply of the Seigneur, 

41 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

"Box the girl's ears and send her home to her 
mother!" 

So Durand returned, crestfallen, to the waiting 
Jeanne. 

*'It is no good; he will do nothing for you!" 

But Jeanne was not to be daunted by jeering 
Seigneurs or half-hearted uncles. From this time 
the consciousness of supernatural help seems to 
have been so strong that she no longer faltered, or 
even thought herself unfit. Her marvellous faith, 
indeed, is not one of the least wonderful traits of 
her career. *'Take me to him; I must see him 
myself," she said, and so on Ascension Day, May 
13th of the year 1428, the Maid made her first public 
appearance before the crowd of knights, archers 
and men-at-arms, who had gathered in the hall of 
the castle of Robert de Baudricourt, half in curiosity, 
half in scorn, to see this hare-brained girl. 

In her shabby red frock, with a white coif over 
her short black hair, the Maid entered with that 
air of simplicity and grave courtesy that always 
marked her behaviour. One amongst that crowd 
thus described, in after years, that strange interview : 

*'She said that she came to Robert on the part of 
her Lord; that he should send to the Dauphin and 
tell him to hold out and have no fear, for the Lord 
would send him succour before the middle of the 
Lent of next year. She also said that France did 
not belong to the Dauphin, but to her Lord; but 
her Lord willed that the Dauphin should be its 
king, and hold it in command, and that, in spite of 
his enemies, she herself would conduct him to be 
consecrated. 

42 



The Maid Obeys 

"Robert then asked, 'Who was this Lord of hers?' 
"She answered, 'He is the King of Heaven.' 
*'This being done, she returned to her father's 
house with her uncle, Durand Lassois of Burey." 

The effect of this interview upon Robert de Baudri- 
court is left to our imagination. Astounded he must 
have been, incredulous probably; but there was some- 
thing in the quiet assurance of the Maid that may 
have touched some secret spring in his heart. The 
least religious of men are often the most superstitious, 
and the evident impression made upon the young 
knight, de Poulengy, whose words are quoted above, 
may have been shared by him. Outwardly, however, 
he remained a scoffer; and Jeanne, rebuffed but by 
no means disheartened, returned to her father's 
house. 

The next few months must have been some of the 
most difficult in the life of the Maid. It was impos- 
sible that the good folk of Domremy should be 
kept any longer in ignorance of what she believed 
to be her destiny. Durand Lassois would talk of the 
interview at Vaucouleurs; communication between 
Burey and Domremy would not be infrequent, and 
we may be sure that the former place had been stirred 
to gossip and comment on what had passed. The 
parents of the Maid were overwhelmed with horror 
at the thought of the presumption of their quiet 
little daughter, and of the possible fate in store for 
her. 

The good Isambeau would probably show her 
disapproval only by grave looks and unusual silence; 
but the heart of Jacques d'Arc, the father, grim 
French peasant that he was, was full of wrath and 

43 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

gloomy foreboding. He had a dream in which he saw 
the girl surrounded by armed men, in the midst of 
a company of rough troopers. Horrified at the 
idea of his gentle, innocent child in such company, 
he woke, and telling the dream to his wife and sons 
in the morning, said impressively, "If I could 
think that the thing could happen that I dreamed, 
I would wish that Jeanne should be drowned; and 
if you would not do it, I should do it with my own 
hands." 

Nothing is harder to bear than a daily atmosphere 
of suspicion, anger, dark looks and darker words 
from those we love. In days when a parent possessed 
unlimited power over his children even to the point 
of life and death, Jeanne was not even free from 
dread of corporal punishment of the most severe 
kind. 

"Whip her well and send her home to her father," 
had been de Baudricourt's reiterated advice to 
Durand Lassois, and knowing the hard nature of 
her parent, the girl dared not speak openly of her 
intentions at home. Sometimes, however, the need 
of speech became too urgent; and it was on one of 
these occasions that the Maid observed one day to 
Michael Lebuin, a boy of about her own age: 

"There is a girl between Coussey and Vaucouleurs 
who in less than a year from now will cause the 
Dauphin to be anointed king of France." 

Half in fun, half in awe, the lad repeated the words 
to others. No woman is a prophet in her own 
country, and as Jeanne passed by, her bright young 
face somewhat overcast by the displeasure at home 
and the want of sympathy abroad, the gossips 

44 



The Maid Obeys 

pointed at her mockingly, saying, "There goes she 
who is to restore France and the royal house." 

Then evil whispers concerning witchcraft and 
possession began to be put about the village. 
"Jeannette has met her fate beneath the Fairies' 
Tree," said an ill-natured dame; and a brother of 
the Maid repeated it to her with a jeer. 

This roused up the good Isambeau d'Arc to take 
definite action. She would not have her little 
Jeanne branded as a witch, or worse, on account 
of some brain-sick fancies which the silly child had 
picked up Heaven knows where. The best cure for 
her was a sensible homely marriage, the cares and 
troubles of which would soon clear her brain and 
give her something better to think of. 

There seems to have been some lad of the village 
who, at the instigation of her parents, was willing to 
declare, nay, even to swear before the ecclesiastical 
court at Toul that Jeanne had promised to marry 
him. 

But here the Maid stood firm. Neither threats 
nor persuasion from her parents, nor protestations 
of affection from her would-be lover had the smallest 
effect upon her. Her destiny was to save France, 
not to marry; and obedient child as she had always 
been, she now became an open rebel. It was no 
small thing to risk offending a father whose temper 
was not improved by other worries just at that time. 
For, at the instigation of Bedford, Regent of France, 
the Governor of the neighbouring district of Cham- 
pagne was attempting to bring Vaucouleurs into 
subjection to the English, and devastating meantime 
all the villages through which he had to pass. 

45 



The Story of Jeanne d^Arc 

Domremy was one of these, and knowing what it 
meant, Jacques d'Arc was forced to take his family 
and flocks for safety to the market town of Neuf- 
chliteau, five miles away. 

Once installed there, Jeanne had hopes that peace 
might come to her through the need of constant watch- 
ing over the cattle, and that past troubles would be 
swamped in the present danger and discomfort. 
To her dismay, she found that her persistent lover, 
no doubt at the suggestion of her parents, had 
sworn before the judge at Toul that Jeanne was 
affianced to him, and asked that measures might be 
taken to force her to the marriage. Her parents 
threw all the weight of their opinion against the 
girl, but here Jeanne's spirit rose to the occasion. 
*'She had made no such promise. She would go 
to Toul herself and swear it before the judge." 

*'That is impossible," they told her, painting in 
vivid terms the long journey on foot involved, by 
roads infested with men-at-arms, through a devas- 
tated country. But Jeanne stood firm. "She had 
always obeyed her parents in everything save in 
the matter of the trial at Toul," she said sadly in 
later days. It was a foretaste of martyrdom, for 
to some sensitive natures defiance of the wishes 
of those loved most tenderly is worse than bodily 
death. 

So to Toul she went, encouraged only by her 
Voices, which bade her fear nothing; and having 
won her case went back to face the grim displeasure 
on her father's countenance. 

Back to Domremy, a wrecked and ruined village, 
they returned, forVaucouleurs had fallen, though it 

46 



The Maid Obeys 

had not yet been handed over to the English. Even 
the church, Jeanne's favourite refuge, had been 
almost destroyed; and no longer could she creep 
there for daily Mass and Compline, as to an ark of 
refuge. 

Sadly the autumn must have passed away, nor 
would its gloom be lightened by news received from 
the outside world. For the city of Orleans, the 
key to Southern France, was now beleaguered by 
the English, who had seized all the smaller towns 
above and below it on the river, and were building 
towers around the city itself. If Orleans fell, there 
was nothing to keep the foe from penetrating into 
the heart of the kingdom and making themselves 
masters of the whole land. The knell of French 
independence had struck, and simultaneously the 
Voices of the Maid spoke with no uncertain sound. 
"She must leave her village and go into France." 

Not long after the Christmas of that year (1428), 
her chance came. The wife of Durand Lassois 
needed help with her young babe, and Jeanne lost 
no time in urging her uncle to beg her father to let her 
go to his house. Perhaps Jacques d'Arc hoped thus 
to change the current of her thoughts, perhaps he 
feared to offend a relative, though it is strange that 
he should have allowed the girl to go to one who 
had already aided and abetted her in what he 
conceived to be foolish, if not criminal, conduct. 
With a strong foreboding that she had looked for the 
last time on the home of her childhood, the Maid went 
forth. *' Good-bye, I am going to Vaucouleurs !" she 
cried to the children who had been her playmates 
as they ran to the garden gate to see her pass. 

47 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

* ' Good-bye, Mengette," to another girl companion, 
"God bless thee!" But to the little Hauviette, her 
bosom friend, she said nothing of her departure; 
she could not trust herself to say farewell to her. 
"Whereat," we read, "when she heard of her 
departure, she (Hauviette) wept bitterly because 
she loved her so much for her goodness, and because 
she was her dearest friend." 

And so Jeanne d'Arc passed away from Domremy 
for ever. 



Advienne quepourra 

(The last words of de Baudri- 
court to Jeanne^ 

CHAPTER V: Th Journey 
Begun. February 1492 

AT Petit Burey, where Jeanne was living in 
the beginning of the year 1429, there was 
rehef from the strain of home disapproval, 
but not less anxiety as to how her mission was to 
be fulfilled. The Voices of the Maid had fixed 
Mid-Lent as the time when she must "be with 
the King.'* This was fast approaching, but Jeanne, 
sewing and spinning in the house of her uncle, 
and later at that of other friends at Vaucouleurs, 
was seemingly no nearer accomplishing her purpose 
than before. 

In later years witnesses from the little town spoke 
in touching words of their memories of the Maid 
at this time; of her quiet patience, her frequent 
confessions, her earnest prayers in the Chapel of Our 
Lady, in the Castle, before the battered image that 
can still be seen there. But at first all seemed 
hopeless enough. More than once she managed to 
gain an interview with de Baudricourt at the Castle 
of Vaucouleurs, but still he scoffed, though with less 
assurance, and she was forced to return, downcast 
but not disheartened, to her hostess. To her she 
spoke openly and with absolute confidence. 

"I must be with the Dauphin by Mid-Lent though 
I should travel on my knees. I must certainly go, 
for it is the Will of my Lord. It is by the King of 
Heaven that this work is entrusted to me. Have 

49 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

you never heard how it has been prophesied that 
France shall be lost by a woman, and restored by a 
maid from the Marches of Lorraine?" 

These words made a good deal of sensation in 
the town. Some scoffed, others looked with fresh 
interest at the tall, bright-faced girl with the earnest 
eyes, who, in her shabby red dress, had become a 
familiar figure about their streets. 

In the second week of February, one of the scoflPers, 
a careless young man of twenty-seven named Jean 
de Metz, who knew something of her and her people 
at Domremy, met her in Vaucouleurs and said 
teasingiy : 

"Ma mie, what are you doing here? Must the 
King be turned out of his kingdom and are we all 
to be made into Englishmen?" 

To which she answered with sweet dignity, *'I 
am here because this is a royal town, and I would 
ask Robert de Baudricourt to lead me to the King. 
But Baudricourt cares nothing for me nor for what 
I say; none the less I must be with the King by 
Mid-Lent if I wear my legs down to the knees by 
walking there. No man in the world can recover 
the kingdom of France, nor hath our King any hope 
of succour but from myself — though I would far rather 
be sewing by the side of my poor mother, for this 
deed suits me very ill. Yet go I must, and the 
deed I must do, for my Lord wills it." 

"And who is your Lord?" asked the youth, 
half convinced, and striving with difficulty to keep 
up his jesting tone. 

"My Lord is God," said the Maid very simply. 

The young soldier's defences utterly gave way. 

50 



The Journey Begun 

Seizing her hands he cried, "Then I, Jean de 
Metz, swear to you, Maid Jeanne, that God helping 
me, I will lead you to the King, and I only ask when 
you are prepared to go." 

"Better to-day than to-morrow," she answered with 
her ready smile. "Better to-morrow than later." 

But though Jean meant what he said, he did not 
want to take the whole responsibility. A chance 
of shifting it on to other shoulders seemed just at 
that moment to present itself, for the Duke of 
Lorraine, having heard the reports of a wonderful 
Maid who was said to foretell the future, sent for 
her to Nancy, some sixty miles away. With her 
on horseback Jean travelled for part of the way, 
Durand Lassois being her guide and guardian; 
and since anything was better than inaction, Jeanne's 
heart beat high with hope. But she found at Nancy 
only a diseased old man, full of anxiety about his 
own health, who cared for her concerns only so far 
as he hoped she could prophesy good things as to 
his recovery. Boldly the Maid told him she knew 
nothing of such matters, and begged him to send 
his son-in-law with an army to lead her into France, 
where she "promised to pray for his better health." 
But he, disappointed on finding her only a sensible, 
clear-eyed maiden instead of the visionary he had 
hoped, sent her off with four francs for her trouble, 
and possibly a horse; and so Jeanne was obliged to 
return once more to Vaucouleurs. 

Perhaps it was on this return journey that her 
Voices again spoke to her, revealing events that as 
yet had not penetrated so far to the south-east. 
For immediately she reached the town she seems 

51 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

to have sought out Baudrlcourt once more and to 
have said in solemn warning, "In God's name, you 
are too slow in sending me; for this day, near 
Orleans, a great disaster has befallen the gentle 
Dauphin, and worse fortune he will have unless you 
send me to him." 

Still bluff de Baudricourt, though inwardly uneasy, 
shook his thick head, with a clumsy jest; but some 
few days later a story in confirmation of Jeanne's 
words arrived by means of a king's messenger. At 
Rouvray, in the Battle of the Herrings, on February 
12, 1429, the Constable of Scotland, in alliance with 
the French, had been badly defeated by the English, 
and a heavy blow had been struck at the Dauphin's 
cause. "There mAist be something in this girl," 
Baudricourt seems to have argued when he heard 
this news; and then a light dawned upon him. She 
must be bewitched; it is the evil spirit within her 
that speaks, not herself. Anyway, the matter shall 
be put to the test. 

So, into the kitchen of the good-wife, with whom 
Jeanne was staying, loomed the sudden apparition of 
the bluff knight and the priest of the Castle chapel.- 
The woman and the girl, busy with their spinning, 
sprang up in astonishment; the former was asked 
to withdraw, and Jeanne, seeing the priest putting 
on his stole, fell on her knees. 

Over her the good man proceeded to utter the 
words by which evil spirits were exorcised, "If thou 
be evil, away with thee; if thou be good, draw nigh." 

Then the girl understood, and with her gentle, 
half-reproachful smilC;, came toward him on her 
knees. 

52 



The Journey Begun 

That settled the matter. Jeanne, in talking of 
the matter with her hostess, said quietly that the 
priest had had no right to do this, for he had heard 
her confession and knew her for what she really 
was; but the effect upon de Baudricourt was 
remarkable. From this time, though never an 
enthusiast in her cause, he no longer treated her 
as a silly child, but as one to be reckoned with, as 
a person of consideration. All opposition to her 
setting off to the Dauphin was dropped, though, 
either from meanness or from dread of being mistaken 
in her, he took little share in her equipment. The 
people of Vaucouleurs, now full of faith in the Maid 
and of enthusiasm for her mission, subscribed 
toward her expenses, the main burden of which 
were borne by Jean de Metz, still her firm friend, 
and Bertrand de Poulengy, the young officer who 
had been so deeply impressed by the girl on her first 
visit to the Castle. The presence of the King's 
messenger gave added point to her departure, as 
he was prepared to accompany the little band to 
Chinon. 

One detail of her equipment may have been 
Jeanne's idea for her own safety, or it may have been 
first suggested by de Metz, in his fear of the ridicule 
that might fall upon him were he seen by his gay 
friends as the cavalier of the peasant maid in her 
shabby red frock. Jean certainly seems to have 
asked her if she would consent to ride in boy 's dress, 
to which she readily agreed. Probably her own 
knowledge of the difficulties of the journey, and of 
her own ignorance of the art of riding, had already 
suggested the plan to her. 

S3 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

She rode forth from the "Gate of France," there- 
fore, clad in the dark cloth tunic reaching to her 
knees, high boots and leggings, and black cap of a 
page. She was escorted by Colet de Vienne, the 
King's messenger, Richard the Archer, his squire, 
and the two young knights, de Metz and de Poulengy, 
with their two men-at-arms; and all the inhabitants 
of the little town flocked out to see her depart. 

*'Go, and let come what will!" growled de Baud- 
ricourt, as he handed her a sword, gazing still with 
puzzled disfavor at the slight boyish figure on the 
big white horse. 

"Turn back, little Jeanne," cried the voice of a 
woman in the crowd, her heart filled with mother 
love and pity for the young maid, "you cannot 
go — all the ways are beset by rough men-at-arms." 

But the girl replied with joyful dignity: 

"The way is made clear before me. I have my 
Lord to make the way smooth to the gentle Dauphin ; 
for to do this deed I was born." 

And thus the little band rode forth into the night 



54 



lis etaient grandement 
ebahis comme une si 
simple hergere jeune fille 
pouvait ainsi repondre 

(Examination of Jeanne d'Arc) 

CHAPTER VI: ^/ Poitiers. 
Spring 1429 

THAT must have been a strange journey, 
that eleven days' ride from Vaucouleurs 
to Chinon, on the Loire. 

The heart of the Maid was light and gay, for the 
first step in fulfilment of her mission had at last 
been taken. She had, moreover, in reply to tender 
messages sent to Domremy, received a letter of 
forgiveness from her parents, together with a ring 
of broad plated gold, inscribed with the names 
Jesus, Maria. 

Straight-backed, healthy, long of limb, she sat 
her great horse, tossing back her short dark hair 
from her brow, and gazing with bright grey eyes 
into the dark ways in front of her, as though she 
already saw the end of her journey ere it had well 
begun. 

Her companions bore a different spirit within 
their breasts. They had taken a vow before de 
Baudricourt to protect and honour the Maid, but, 
beside the fact that they had a long and dangerous 
road in front of them, they carried chilly doubts at 
their hearts. 

"Will you really do what you say.^" Jean de 
Metz inquired of her, being full of fear of the ridicule 

55 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

that would assuredly cover him should Jeanne 
prove an impostor. 

"Have no fear," she replied, "for my Brothers 
of Paradise have always told me what I should do, 
and it is now four years or five since they and my 
Lord have told me that I must go to the war that 
France may be recovered." 

The men-at-arms, also, possibly, their master, 
the King's messenger, had even less faith in her. 
They felt their task an indignity. Who was this 
village girl that she should require such an escort ^ 

Once, in rude jest, they tried to frighten her by 
pretending they were set upon by English or 
Burgundian troops. But the Maid, though she 
believed them, was not afraid. 

"Do not flee! I tell you, in God's name, they will 
not harm you!" she cried, and her simple courage 
must have touched even those rough hearts to 
shame. 

Riding by night, and sleeping by day among the 
straw of some inn-stable by the roadside, the girl 
bore well the hardships of the journey, her one 
regret being that it was not considered safe in that 
hostile country to let her hear Mass every day. 
Choosing by-ways and avoiding high roads and 
bridges, the journey was toilsome enough, and 
four flooded rivers had to be forded ere they could 
draw a long breath of relief at Gien, in the country 
of the Dauphin. At Fierbois, a stage nearer to 
Chinon, she was delighted to find a chapel dedicated 
to one of her favourite saints, St Catherine, the 
patroness of captive soldiers and imprisoned peasants. 

In that chapel she said her prayer of faith, and 

56 



At Poitiers 

from that place she dictated a letter to the Dauphin, 
telling him that she had ridden one hundred and 
fifty leagues to tell him things that would be useful 
to him, and which she alone knew. She ended 
with a declaration of loyal affection, in which she 
may have said that she would recognize him, her 
*gentle prince,' among all others, though in later 
days she seems to have forgotten this saying, if, 
indeed, she ever said it. 

At midday she set out for the town of Chinon, 
which had been for some time the refuge of the 
Dauphin. 

Chinon 
Petit ville 
Grande renom. 

So ran the old jingle, dating from the days when 
the Plantagenet princes lived in the fortress of 
Coudray, which frowned over the gabled houses of 
the town. "The great walls, interrupted and 
strengthened by huge towers, stretch along a low 
ridge of rocky hill, with the swift and clear river — 
the Vienne — flowing at its foot," says one of Jeanne's 
chroniclers; and within these strong walls, the dull- 
witted, timid young Dauphin strove to forget the 
miseries of the land, fast slipping from his grasp, 
in amusements, dancing and games. 

The ruling spirit of the Court of Chinon was La 
Tremouille, that stout, coarse-featured noble "always 
defeated, always furious, bitter, ferocious, whose 
awkwardness and violence created an impression 
of rude frankness."^ 

The influence of this violent character was the 

^ A, France. 

57 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

worst thing possible for the faint-hearted Charles. 
The prince owed La Tremouille money, in security 
for which he had been obliged to hand over to him 
many broad lands and fair castles. Without his 
leave he dared not act even if he would; and it 
was to La Tremouille's interest, traitor as he was 
at heart, to make him play the waiting game. 

To such a man the coming of the innocent Maid, 
with her boy's clothes and her pure eyes full of faith 
and confidence, was a thing to be scoffed at, if it 
were noticed at all. Probably that little letter of 
Jeanne to the Dauphin had passed through his 
rough hands, and been torn up and scattered to 
the winds as a bit of sheer nonsense; for the Dauphin 
knew nothing of it when she appeared at the Castle 
gates, craving leave to see the prince. 

*'Who was she, and why had she come.?'* they 
asked her; to which she simply replied that she had 
come to relieve Orleans and to cause the King to 
be crowned at Rheims. 

There was a delay of two days while the Court 
considered her request, and Jeanne was fain to 
possess her eager soul in patience. Slowly the hours 
must have passed, as the Maid, weak with her Lenten 
fast, looked forth from the steep street where she 
had found lodging to the great grey walls that 
enclosed one who was ever to her a hero prince, 
her *gentle Dauphin.' Then creeping into the 
dusky shadows of St Maurice, the nearest church, 
Jeanne knelt and prayed, and heard, perchance, 
repeated there the message now grown familiar to 
her listening ears: 

"Daughter of God, thou shalt lead the Dauphin 



At Poitiers 

to Rheims that he may there receive worthily his 
anointing." 

Poor httle lonely figure, kneeling there in the cold 
spring twilight, waiting with such eager longing 
to fulfil the commands of God! Let us hope that 
the *good woman' with whom she lodged those 
two days looked with kindly eyes upon the slim 
girlish figure and gave her a motherly kiss ere she 
sought her couch. This is her own simple account 
of the matter: — 

*'I was constantly at prayers in order that God 
should send the King a sign. I was lodging with a 
good woman when that sign was given him, and 
then I was summoned to the King." 

Whether this 'sign' was anything more than a 
decision on the part of his Council of courtiers that 
it would be to their interest, possibly to their 
amusement, to see the strange maiden from Domremy, 
we cannot say. Possibly, indeed, Jeanne is referring 
to that other 'sign' given by her to the Dauphin 
during their first interview, of which so much was 
made at her trial, and concerning which she was so 
careful to baffle her questioners rather than betray 
the 'secret of the King.' 

It was evening when the Maid climbed the steep 
ascent and passed through the Old Gate that led 
into the Castle of Chinon. Its vast hall was crowded 
with armed barons, courtiers in long furred robes, 
knights and younger nobles in their pointed shoes, 
tight hosen, and brightly coloured tunics. The 
brilliant scene was lit up by flaming torches held 
by pages standing against the walls, which for a 
moment dazzled the sight of Jeanne as she stood 

59 



The Story of Jeanne d^Arc 

within the great doorway. All eyes were turned 
upon her, and most of those faces were either openly 
hostile, contemptuous, or showed a sneering smile 
of amusement at the sight of the slim young Maid 
in her boy's dress, her short dark hair flung back 
from her broad and open brow. 

In order to raise a silly laugh at her, the Dauphin, 
dressed in ordinary clothes, had slipped behind the 
courtiers into another room, and as she looked about 
her, with that straight and fearless gaze of hers, 
there were not wanting those who would try to 
impose upon her with trickery. "See, there is 
tlie Dauphin!" said one, pointing to Charles de 
Bourbon in his princely robes. Some, with ill-bred 
chuckles, drew her attention to other gaily dressed 
nobles. But the Maid did not heed them. Looking 
quietly from one to another, she waited till Charles 
entered the hall, and at once, going up to him, knelt 
before him saying: 

" God send you life, gentle Dauphin." 

The prince, somewhat out of countenance at the 
failure of his practical joke, peevishly asked her 
name. 

"I am Jeanne the Maid," she answered. 

"And what do you want of me, Jeanne .f*" 

"The King of Heaven sends me to succour you 
and your kingdom, and to conduct you to Rheims to 
be crowned." 

The absolute simplicity and perfect confidence 
of the words seem to have gone straight to the 
heart of Charles, who drew her aside and held her 
in earnest conversation. 

At what passed on that occasion we can but 

60 



At Poitiers 

guess. Much has been made of some *secret sign' 
given by Jeanne by which the Prince openly declared 
he had been most deeply impressed. But what 
this was the Maid herself would never reveal; and 
we can but conjecture, from the hints dropped in 
after years by one of the few confidants of the 
King, that Jeanne had revealed her knowledge 
of his secret fears and scruples and prayers as to 
whether he were the true heir to the throne, and 
had reassured him that all was well with him, and 
that God intended him to be crowned. 

Yet it was impossible for a slow, timid nature, 
such as that of Charles, to act at once, and the 
girl was dismissed, though with a due amount of 
honour. She was lodged in a tower of the Castle, 
under the care of a good and pious woman, and 
given a noble young page, Louis de Coutes, to 
wait upon her. 

Now and again she was sent for to hold converse 
with the Prince and his advisers, but nothing seemed 
to come of such meetings, and the Maid was fain 
to pray afresh and weep with annoyance at such 
delay. 

"You hold so many and such long councils," 
she said to the Dauphin on one occasion, "and I 
have but a year and a little more in which to finish 
all my work." 

From the first that piteous prophecy was the 
burden of all her warnings. Why were they so 
slow to accept Jeanne with confidence.'^ The 
history of the time provides us with an answer. 

At this period, as we have seen, the religious and 
political state of Europe was in a ferment. The 

6i 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

Turks were threatening to overrun Western as well 
as Eastern Europe; three popes claimed to be Head 
of Christendom; and no man knew to whom to look 
with confidence for religious or political truth and 
righteousness. 

Such times have often produced a crowd of 
impostors pretending to be the saviours of their 
country. Sometimes they were fanatics, self- 
deceived; sometimes they were deliberate frauds. 
Only a few years earlier a woman named Marie of 
Avignon had talked of a vision in which she had 
been bidden to arm herself and go fight for the 
King; and when she shrank from the task, was 
told that the weapons were not for her but for 
another Maid, who should shortly arise and liberate 
France. This event, while it certainly predisposed 
the ordinary citizens of Chinon to look with awe 
and favour upon Jeanne, only did harm to her cause 
with irreligious nobles like La Tremouille or with 
worldly ecclesiastics who would keep all supernatural 
matters within their own province; for the success 
of the Maid would be a reproach, they thought, to 
them for their failure. 

One consolation came to Jeanne in those dark 
days of waiting. The young Due d'Alenpon, of 
the blood royal, who had been taken captive at 
Verneuil, had just returned to Chinon from five 
years' sojourn in prison, disheartened and weary of 
the unhappy cause for which he had already suffered. 
He had been shooting quails in the marshes of the 
river meadows, when he heard that Jeanne had 
arrived, and was at that moment talking to the 
Dauphin. As he entered the hall, his handsome, 

62 



At Poitiers 

boyish figure at once attracted the attention of the 
Maid. 

"Who is that?" she asked the Dauphin, and 
when she heard his name, "Sire, you are welcome," 
she said, "the more we have of the blood royal 
here the better." 

After the royal Mass next day the Dauphin called 
the Maid and the young Duke together, with La 
Tremouille, into his private room to breakfast with 
him; and there, in company strange enough to a 
peasant girl, did Jeanne speak boldly to the vacillating 
Charles, bidding him amend his life and live after 
the Will of God, bidding him also to place his realm 
in the hands of the Almighty and in sure confidence 
to receive it again from Him. 

We can see La Tremouille' s coarse lips writhe in a 
scornful smile at the simple earnest words, and the 
uneasy impatience of the Dauphin. But d'Alen^on's 
nobler nature was struck, as that of Jean de Metz had 
been, by her sincerity and quiet force. From that 
moment he was her staunch friend; and almost 
immediately after their meeting, when they rode out 
together for exercise in the meadows, Jeanne so 
won his heart in another way by her pluck and 
skill in throwing a lance that he made her a present 
of a horse. 

A few days later he took her to the Abbey of 
St Florent, where his mother and his young wife 
were staying. They too were won by the simple 
good breeding of the Maid, though the poor little 
wife said pathetically, before they parted, " Jeannette, 
I am full of fear for my husband. He has just 
come out of prison, and we have had to give so much 

63 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

money for his ransom that gladly would I entreat 
him to stay at home." To which the Maid replied, 
"Madame, fear not, I will bring him back to yon 
in safety, either as he is now, or better." 

We cannot wonder that the girl preferred the 
character of her 'beau Due,' now full of energy for 
the fight as well as of confidence in her as a leader, 
to the uncertain, weak young King, who would not 
make up his mind to do anything at all. 

At last there was a new stir at the Castle. Some- 
thing was to be done, some journey undertaken. 
The Maid was delighted and made her small prepara- 
tions in eager haste, hoping that she was to be 
allowed to go straight to Orleans. 

Only when she was in the saddle and had ridden 
some miles did she learn that she was to go to Poitiers, 
to be examined as to her mission by the university 
and the local parliament of that town. To her 
this seemed a heart-sickening delay; but there is 
perhaps some excuse for it when we remember the 
very critical state of affairs, and the inevitable 
line taken by the King's counsellors. To trust the 
affairs of the realm, now already tottering to its 
fall, to a peasant girl utterly unversed in matters 
of warfare, where great soldiers like Dunois and 
statesmen like La Tr^mouille had failed, seemed 
nothing less than ludicrous. "But what if she be 
sent by God.^^ Is it not possible that the Divine 
help may overcome her natural difficulties.?" the 
Dauphin might have argued. And the Church of 
that day would reply with cold and superior 
scorn, "How are we to know that she is divinely 
sent? How does she differ from Marie d' Avignon 

64 



A Poitiers 

and many another visionary and impostor? What 
is to be the proof?" 

We cannot think it strange that they hesitated;, 
the stranger thing is that, when Jeanne came before 
this hostile array, she certainly did, to a great extent, 
manage to convince it. 

Loathing the delay as she did, the whole thing 
must have been a cause of deep irritation and 
annoyance to the girl; and though she had always 
been humble and reverent toward the authority of 
the Church, she almost lost her temper with some 
of her questioners — Dominican monks, who strove 
to bully her and who were answered with the rough 
directness of an angry girl. 

*'You say," said one of these, "that God will 
deliver France; if He has so determined He has 
no need of inen-at-arms." 

*'0h! can't you see?" she cried, impatiently. 
*'In God's name the men-at-arms will fight, and 
God will give the victory." 

"What language does the Voice speak?" said 
one who himself talked in broad dialect. 

"A better language than yours!" she answered 
sharply, perhaps detecting the scornful inflection of 
his words. 

The questioner seems to have lost his own temper 
at this thrust, for he asks her abruptly : 

"Do you believe in God?" 

"More firmly than you do!" 

"Well, God does not wish us to believe in you with- 
out better evidence. We cannot advise the King to 
entrust you with men-at-arms on your word alone, 
and risk their lives, unless you can show us a sign." 

65 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

"In God's name!" cried the Maid, "I did not 
come to Poitiers to give signs! Take me to Orleans, 
and I will show you the signs of my sending; give 
me few men or many, but let me go!" 

Still, however, the wearisome examination dragged 
on. Interview followed interview, till the girl was 
heartily sick of the whole thing. Rashly, perhaps, 
she confided to her friend d'Alencon, that "she had 
been much questioned, but she knew and could do 
more than she had confided to the inquirers"; 
arid this may have accounted for their uncertainty. 
They felt the power in reserve, and were unwilling 
to acknowledge it, but they had to do so in the 
end. 

"The Maid's character has been studied; inquiry 
has been made into her past life, her birth, her 
intentions; for six weeks she has been examined 
by clerks, churchmen, men of the sword, matrons 
and widows. Nothing has been found in her but 
honesty, simplicity, humility, maidenhood and 
devotion .... She may go therefore with the army, 
under honourable superintendence." 

Thus was won the first victory over sloth, and 
doubt, and suspicion. Every effort had been made 
to rake up something discreditable in her past or 
present life. To prove her a bold girl, lacking in 
habits of modesty and discretion, would have settled 
the question against her. Hence that other examina- 
tion, hinted here, of discreet widows and matrons, 
whose sharp eyes and instincts were not likely to be 
at fault; and the hearts of these good ladies were 
promptly won by the modesty and purity of the 

^ Mr. Andrew Lang's version has here been followed. 
66 



At Poitiers 

Maid, as those of many of the soldiers and young 
nobles had been by her pluck and spu-it. For let 
us alv/ays see her, not as a pious visionary, full of 
ecstatic experiences that place her above this common 
earth, but rather, as one of her most sympathetic 
biographers says, as a clean, honest, public school- 
boy, "full of chivalry as of sanctity," fearless in 
the face of danger, and all the while keeping clear 
and undimmed the window of her soul. 



67 



En avant, fille de 
Dieu, et nous vous 
aiderons (Les Voix) 

CHAPTER VII: ^/ Or/earn. 
April 1429 

|0 at length an expedition was appointed to 
set out from Chinon to Orleans. It was no 
mere question of bad roads and fordless 
rivers that had given the Dauphin pause. He knew 
but too well that at least three of the strongly 
fortified towns on the route were in the hands of the 
English, who also held the banks of the Loire. 
Faith in the divine mission of the Maid must certainly 
have increased by this time, for we hear that, when 
it was proposed to clear the way by driving the foemen 
from their fortresses, Jeanne was put at the head of 
the expedition, and orders were given that nothing 
should be done without her sanction. 

So first she goes with a light heart to the city of 
Tours, a rich and loyal town, held by the mother- 
in-law of the Dauphin, where her equipment for 
battle was to be prepared. There, while the suit 
of 'white armour' was being forged by cunning 
smiths, she procured for herself the sword about 
which there was so much talk in after days. As she 
passed through Fierbois on the way to Chinon she had 
prayed in the Church of St Catherine, her patron, 
and had noted there behind, or in front of the altar 
the tomb of a knight. There need have been no 
supernatural intervention here; that a knight's 

68 



At Orleans 

tomb should contain his sword was a well-known 
fact. On the other hand, the devout Maid would 
prefer that her sword should come to her straight, 
as it were, from the hands of her own special saint. 
So she could say with truth to her judges, when 
they tried to prove witchery in the matter: 

"While I was at Tours I sent to seek for a sword 
in the Church of St Catherine of Fierbois behind 
the altar; and presently it was found all rusty. It 
had five crosses on it, and I knew of it through my 
Voices. I had never seen the man who went to 
look for it. I wrote to the Churchmen at Fierbois 
and asked them to let me have it and they sent it. 
It was not deep in the earth; I am not certain 
whether it was behind the altar or in front. When 
it was found the clergy rubbed it, and the rust 
readily fell off. The man who brought it was a 
merchant of Tours who sold armour. The clergy 
of Fierbois gave me a sheath; the people of Tours 
gave me two, one of red velvet, one of cloth of gold; 
but I had a strong leather sheath made for it." 

Not only the position of her sword was communi- 
cated to Jeanne at this time by her mysterious 
Voices; she told the Dauphin that she would be 
wounded by an arrow at Orleans, but not unto 
death. The prediction was taken down in writing, 
and was fulfilled, as we shall see, a fortnight later. 

Meantime a 'Household,' or retinue, had been 
appointed for the Maid of Domremy, consisting of 
an Augustinian friar named Pasquerel, who acted 
as her confessor, a squire, and two pages. Of these 
Pasquerel must have been greeted with especial joy 
by Jeanne, for he had come straight from the town 

69 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

of Puy, whence he brought news of her mother, 
Isambeau d'Arc, and her two brothers who had gone 
there for the great yearly festival of the Annuncia- 
tion, kept with special solemnity in that place; 
and he had talked to her brothers with such effect 
tliat the two young men were already preparing to 
join their sister on her march to Orleans, leaving 
poor Isambeau to return to Domremy with a heart 
bursting with love and pride and fear for the girl 
she had nursed in the bygone years. 

By the time they had left the town of Blois behind 
them, her troop had been joined by a band of priests, 
who marched in advance under the banner made 
for her at Tours. This had been specially designed 
by the Maid, according to the directions given her, 
she said, by Saint Margaret and Saint Catherine. 
Upon a white linen ground stood the figure of the 
Christ holding the round world in His hands, with an 
adoring angel on either side. Below were inscribed 
the names, 'Jesus, Maria.' 

The banner was generally upheld by the strong 
young arm of the Maid herself. "Take the standard 
from the hand of God and bear it boldly" her saints 
had told her, and Jeanne, with a girl's dread of 
bloodshed, was no doubt glad to exchange her 
little battle-axe for the banner, which would prevent 
her also from using the sword which hung at her 
side. 

The whole army was "more like a religious 
procession than an army," for the priests sang 
hymns as they marched, and twice a day held a 
religious service beneath the sacred banner. By 
the strict command of the Maid, "no man might 

70 



At Orleans 

swear by aught but liis baton," or join in the singing 
"unless he were clean confessed." 

Such, then, was the appearance of the force that 
arrived on the 28th of April on the south bank of 
the Loire, opposite the beleaguered city of Orleans. 

The condition of this town, "almost the last 
barrier between the invader and the final subjuga- 
tion of France," was deplorable. These huge towers, 
built by the English, threatened them from the 
outer walls; provisions were almost exhausted; 
the English, stationed in the camp between the 
Regnart gate and the river, had but to play a waiting 
game. 

And yet perhaps the most curious part of the 
matter is that Orleans was strongly garrisoned, 
so strongly that her troops might well have been 
sufficient to drive off the English forces and to pre- 
vent them from building those threatening towers. 
The town was commanded, moreover, by Dunois, 
generally known as the Bastard of Orleans, a brave 
and popular young officer who had won the devotion 
of his people. Yet with all these advantages the 
place was doomed, and both those inside and those 
outside knew it but too well; for the French general 
and his men had alike lost heart, each success of 
their foes reduced their stock of hope and courage 
to a lower ebb, and made them less fit for the 
fight. 

The first intimation that the English forces, under 
the Duke of Bedford, received of the coming of the 
Maid must have been the quaint letter dictated by 
her before she left Tours, and sent thence to the 
camp outside Orleans. 

71 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 



Jesus Maria 

"King of England, and you Duke of Bedford, calling 
yourself Regent of France, you William de la Pole, 
John, Lord of Talbot, and you Thomas, Lord of 
Scales, who call yourselves lieutenants of the said 
Bedford, listen to the King of Heaven: 

"Give back to the Maid who is here sent on the 
part of God the King of Heaven, the keys of all the 
good towns which you have taken by violence in 
His France. She is sent on the part of God to redeem 
the royal rights. She is ready to make peace if you 
will hear reason and be just towards France and 
pay for what you have taken. And you archers, 
brothers-in-arms, gentles and others who are before 
the town of Orleans, go in peace on the part of God; 
if you do not do so, you will soon have news of the 
Maid who will see you shortly to your great damage. 

"King of England, if you do not this, I am 
captain in this war, and in whatsoever place in 
France I find your people I will make them go 
away. I am sent here on the part of God the King 
of Heaven to push you all forth of France. If you 
obey I will be merciful. And be not strong in your 
own opinion, for you do not hold the kingdom from 
God the Son of the Holy Mary, but it is held by 
Charles, the true heir, for God, the King of Heaven 
so wills, and it is revealed by the Maid, who shall 
enter Paris in good company. If you will not believe 
this news on the part of God and the Maid, in what- 
ever place you may find yourselves we shall make 
our way there, and make so great a commotion as 

72 



At Orleans 

has not been in France for a thousand years, if you 
will not hear reason. And believe this, that the 
King of Heaven will send more strength to the 
Maid than you can bring against her in all your 
assaults, to her and to her good men-at-arms. You, 
Duke of Bedford, the Maid prays and requests you 
to destroy no more. 

"If you act according to reason you may still come 
in her company where the French shall do the great- 
est work that has ever been done for Christianity. 

*' Answer then if you will still continue against 
the city of Orleans. If you do so you will soon 
recall it to yourself by great misfortunes. 

''Written the Saturday of Holy Week, 1429." 

One can but try to imagine the astonishment, 
not unmingled with blasphemy, with which the 
English general would read this letter, utterly naive 
in its simplicity, boyishly straightforward in its frank 
confidence. 

Dunois, meantime, had been told of the approach 
of the Maid with her advance guard of priests singing 
the Veni Creator, upon the village of Checy, some 
five miles distant, between the town of Jargeau, 
held by the English, and Orleans. 

At this spot they had crossed the river with the 
intention of marching into the city by the Burgundy 
gate, which was unguarded save by one English 
fort. But Jeanne's aim from the first had been, 
not to enter the city without a struggle, but to 
fight her way through the main camp of the English 
on the farther side of the city; and when she saw 
that her guides, taking advantage of her ignorance 

73 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

of the locality, had tricked her into what they 
thought a course of greater safety, her anger blazed 
forth. Her wrath, moreover, was justified still 
further by the fact that an adverse wind prevented 
the army from sailing up the river to Orleans, as 
was at first planned, and thus laid it open to 
the attack of Suffolk and Talbot, the English 
generals. 

At this juncture she was met by that courteous 
knight Dunois, who had come out from the city 
to meet her at Ch^cy. At once she faces him with 
the frank question: 

*'Are you the Bastard of Orleans?" 

*'I am, and glad am I of your coming," says he. 

*'Is it you," blazes forth the angry Maid, "who 
gave counsel that I should come by this side of the 
river, and not against Talbot and his English at 
once.f^ 

**I, and others wiser that I, gave that counsel, 
and think it is the best and safest way." 

"The counsel of God, our Lord," says she, scorn- 
fully, "is more sure and more powerful than yours. 
You think to deceive me, but you deceive your- 
selves, for I bring you better assistance than ever 
came to knight or city, the succour of the King 
of Heaven." 

The courtesy and good- will of Dunois soon restored 
the Maid to her wonted high spirits and good humour. 
The wind changed to a more favourable quarter so 
that the convoy of provisions was able to sail in 
safety up the river to the city, which it entered 
"with no good will of the English" but with no 
opposition, as Jeanne had already foretold. Mean- 

74 




iii «i'»iiiiiwiiiiiiii tMiiiiiiiiiiiiiiF"iii-'''^|'»'°^' '^Twrr™'™"' 
'BEFORE THE AUlWlV—l'aue 7i 



At Orleans 

time, as the main army had to return to Blois to 
bring up another convoy, Dunois suggested that 
Jeanne should ride with him back to the city and 
enter by the Burgundian gate. Sorely reluctant 
to leave the soldiers whose hearts she had won to 
herself, the Maid at length consented, and either 
rode along the bank or sailed up the river with 
Dunois and La Hire, entering the city without the 
smallest opposition about eight o'clock in the failing 
light of an April evening. 

One cannot wonder that the inhabitants of that 
beleaguered town thronged the streets to look upon 
the white vision of the Maid in shining armour, 
carrying her gleaming banner as she rode through 
the midst of them, and gazed at her "as if they had 
seen God descending among them." 

"For," says an eyewitness of those things, 
"they had suffered many disturbances, labours, 
and pains, and what is worse, great doubt whether 
they ever should be delivered. But now all were 
comforted, as if the siege were over, by the divine 
strength that was in this simple Maid whom they 
regarded most affectionately — men, women, and 
little children. There was a marvellous press around 
her to touch her or the horse on which she rode, so 
much so that one of the torch-bearers approached 
too near and set fire to her pennon; upon which she 
touched her horse with her spurs and turning him 
cleverly, extinguished the flames, as if she had long 
followed the wars." 

First she went to the Church of the Holy Rood, 
and there made her thanksgiving for her safe entry 
into the city, and then to the house of Jacques 

75 



The Story of Jeanne d^Arc 

Boucher, treasurer of the Due d'Orleans, where 
she thankfully removed her heavy armour and shared 
the bed of the little Charlotte, the nine-year-old 
daughter of her host. 

The second great step in the accomplishment of 
her mission had been taken. 



76 



Travaillez ! Travaillez ! 

et Dieu travaillera! 

(The favourite saying of Jeanne d'Arc) 



CHAPTER VIII: TheSiegeof 
Orleans. April i.^- May %^ 1429 



T 



■^HE arrival of Jeanne d'Arc in Orleans was 
the signal not only for a great outbreak 
of loyalty and enthusiasm on the part of 
the harassed citizens, but for determined attempts 
on their part to drive the English from their walls. 
It was all the gallant Maid could do to keep them 
within bounds while she awaited news of the fate 
of her letter to the English generals; for she never 
lost a chance of winning the day by persuasion and 
warning rather than by bloodshed. 

Two heralds, Guienne and Ambleville, had taken 
the letter into the English camp; and presently 
the latter returned with the news that his comrade 
was in the hands of the foemen and about to be 
burnt for having been concerned with a witch and 
her affairs. The Maid heard the information un- 
moved. "Return boldly to them," she said; "they 
will not harm you, and you shall bring back Guienne 
in safety." 

Some say that this actually occurred, others 
declare that the unfortunate herald was kept a 
prisoner, quite against all rules of warfare, till the 
English retreat, when he was found in irons in the 
deserted camp. 

Meantime some citizens and men-at-arms under 

77 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

Captain La Hire, roused by the sight of the Maid 
but disregarding her plea for waiting until an answer 
to her letter should be received, had made an un- 
successful sally from the gate. It was left for 
Jeanne to conduct the campaign in more dignified 
fashion by appearing that night upon the rampart 
of La Belle Croix, which directly faced the English 
garrison of Les Tourelles. 

"Surrender in the name of God, and I will grant 
you your lives." 

So rang out the summons of the shrill girlish voice. 
She was answered by foul insults, while the Captain, 
William Glasdale, after a shower of evil names, 
shouted, "Milkmaid! If ever we get you, you 
shall be burnt alive. 

And the Maid, brave enough in the face of danger, 
but sensitive as the child she was to threats and 
insults, weeps for her shamed womanhood. 

Next day Dunois, the Bastard of Orleans, left the 
city to go and meet the main army as it came from 
Blois. That Sunday was a red-letter day for the 
beleaguered city, for all that it was a day of peace. 
The citizens crowded round the door of the house 
where Jeanne lodged — "they could not see enough 
of her " — and threatened to break in the door. When 
she hastened to appear before them they prayed 
her to lead them at once against the English. But 
she shook her head, and, mounting her horse, led 
them instead down the narrow streets from one 
church to another, dismounting and praying in 
each. 

Later in the day she gave the foe their second 
chance to submit without more ado. Riding through 

78 



The Siege of Orleans 

the Henard gate and down the road toward Blols 
she met a band of Enghsh men-at-arms whom she 
addressed in grave and dignified words. 

"Surrender, and your hves shall be spared. In 
God's name go back to England. If not, I will 
make you suffer for it." 

"Would you have us surrender to a woman?'* 
they cried with coarse jeers; but they allowed 
her to ride back in safety after the deliverance of 
her message. 

It seems, indeed, as though the rough men-at-arms 
had been impressed, in spite of their scorn, by that 
slight young girl who had so confidently addressed 
them, for when Dunois returned, two days later, 
with the convoy of provisions and the main army, 
no attempt was made by the English to hinder their 
progress. They remained fast within their forts, 
while Dunois, hastening to the Maid, brought her 
news that Sir John Fastolf, the victor of Rouvray, 
was marching upon the city from Paris with a large 
force. Eagerly the Maid begged that she might 
be told directly he arrived; and the courteous 
Dunois gave his promise and departed without 
further comment. 

Weary with a long ride round the walls, Jeanne 
lay down on her hostess' bed to sleep, while her 
equerry, d'Aulon, thinking all was quiet inside and 
outside the city, stretched himself on a sofa in the 
room and also fell asleep. Suddenly he was aroused 
by a cry from the Maid, whom he found standing 
with anxious eyes and uplifted hand in the middle 
of the room. 

"In God's name!" she cried to him, "My Voices 

79 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

tell me to go against the English, but I know 
not whether it is against their forts or against 
Fastolf." 

Hastily d 'Anion began to buckle on her armour, 
for already there was a noise of cries and tumult 
in the street. "What is it?" cried the Maid from 
the window, and from the confused replies they 
discovered that an attack had been made, all un- 
known to her, on the English fort of St Loup, and 
that the French were getting the worst of it. 

"Hasten!" cries the girl to her page, for d'Aulon 
had rushed away to get his own weapons and armour. 
"Where is my horse? The blood of our people is 
flowing fast!" Springing on her horse and snatch- 
ing the banner that the boy handed her from the 
upper window, Jeanne spurred off alone to the 
Renard gate, where d 'Anion and her page at length 
came up with her. Through the gate some men- 
at-arms were bearing a grim burden, one of the 
victims of this ill-considered assault. Brave as she 
was, the Maid, girl-like, sickened at the sight. 
"I have never seen the blood of a Frenchman 
flow without feeling my heart stand still!" she 
confessed. 

It was the Maid's first actual fight. Hurriedly 
her scattered troops rallied round the white figure 
waving the gleaming banner, and, following her, 
returned in a breathless rush toward the bastille 
from which they had just been repulsed. For three 
hours the fight lasted, and all the while this child of 
seventeen, with her dread of bloodshed and fear of 
wounds, rode in the forefront, or, springing from her 
horse, stood on the edge of the moat in the midst 

80 



The Siege of Orleans 

of a hail of arrows and cannon balls, cheering on 
her men. 

At length Talbot, the English general, brought a 
troop to the assistance of the English garrison; 
but by the time he came within sight, the fort was 
a smoking mass of charred wood, and the Maid was 
riding back to Orleans, victorious indeed, but heavy 
of heart because so many English soldiers had been 
slain in their sins. 

The next day was the Festival of the Ascension, 
and Jeanne refused to permit further fighting; 
but she thought it a fitting opportunity to send a 
third and last message to the English, which ran as 
follows : — 

"Ye men of England, who have no right in the 
realm of France, the King of Heaven enjoins and 
commands you by me, Jeanne the Maid, to leave 
your forts and return to your country. If ye will 
not, I will make so great a noise as shall remain for 
ever in the memory of man: This I write to you for 
the third and last time, and I will write to you no 
more. Jesus — Maria. Jeanne the Maid." 

To this she added a naive postscript — 
*'I should have sent to you with more ceremony. 
But you keep my heralds. You kept my herald 
Guienne. If you will send him back to me, I will 
send you some of your men taken at the bastion St 
Loup. They are not all dead." 

This note was tied to an arrow, and as Jeanne 
mounted the walls she bade an archer at her side 
shoot it to the English. 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

"Read! This is the message!" she cried. 

A shout of jeering laughter greeted the missive, 
and a foul name smote Jeanne like a flintstone. 
Again she wept, but on her way back the smiles 
returned, and she told her companion that she 
had had "tidings from her Lord." All indeed was 
well with the sensitive soul of the Maid, while the 
Voice of the Divine Friend could be heard drowning 
the rude insults of her foes. 

It was the attack upon the English fortification 
named Les Tourelles that finally established the rep- 
utation of Jeanne as an incomparable leader of men. 

Les Tourelles was a stone fort consisting of double 
towers built on an arch of the bridge spanning the 
river, and was perhaps the most important point of 
vantage that the English held. On the Orleans 
side another arch of the bridge had been destroyed, 
and the towers were further protected by an out- 
work and a strong boulevard on the farther side of 
an arm of the river, crossed at that point by a draw- 
bridge. The boulevard itself was protected by 
high walls and a deep ditch, so that the whole position 
was an exceedingly strong one and would give the 
Maid, in her own words, "much to do, more than I 
ever had yet." 

Jeanne's first difficulty, however, was not with 
the English defences, but with her own people inside 
the city. The citizens were ready enough to follow 
her whom they firmly believed to have been sent them 
from on high; but the veterans of France, the nobles 
who had themselves failed and been repulsed by 
the English foe, thought the time was not yet ripe 
to take risks. 

82 



The Siege of Orleans 

So, when the townsfolk crowded to the Burgundian 
gate, bent on recovering their lost stronghold on 
the bridge, they found that the Sire de Gaucourt 
had closed it against them, and was guarding it 
with his men-at-arms. 

Dismay was spreading among the ranks when into 
their midst rode the white figure of the Maid, crying 
fearlessly to the old general, "You are a bad man 
to try to prevent my people from doing their duty. 
But they shall go, whether you wish it or no, and 
will succeed as they did the other day." 

Her confidence and determination moved the old 
man at once. The gates were thrown open, and 
with a cry of "Come, and I too will lead you,'* the 
troops swept out of the city. 

The river was crossed on a bridge of boats, and the 
attack on the outer fortification of Les Augustins 
was begun from many dijfferent points by means of 
scaling ladders. "In thick swarms came the French, 
attacking on the highest parts of their walls, with 
such hardihood and valour, that to see them you 
would have thought they deemed themselves im- 
mortal. But the English drove them back many 
times, and tumbled them from high to low; fighting 
with bowshot and gunshot, with axes, lances, bills, 
and leaden maces, and even with their fists, so that 
there was some loss in killed and wounded." 

Baffled and disheartened, the citizen soldiers of 
Orleans fell back upon the island which stands in 
the midst of the river. At that moment Jeanne 
and La Hire, the French captain, who had crossed 
by boat with their horses, appeared on the scene, 
just as the English were charging the retreating 

83 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

Frenclimen In the hope of driving them into the river. 
*'In God's name, forward! Forward boldly!" 
With such brave words rang out the voice of the 
Maid; a rush was made upon the defenders, and they 
were driven back helter-skelter behind the outwork 
of the Tourelles. 

It was after this brief moment of triumph that 
Jeanne rode back to Orleans in chastened mood. 

"Rise with the dawn to-morrow, and you will do 
even better than to-day," she said to her men-at- 
arms, regarding them with grave and serious eyes. 
*'Keep close to me; for to-morrow I shall have 
much to do, more than ever I had, and blood will 
flow from my body, above the breast." 

Early next morning the attack upon Les Tourelles 
began, an attack which was to decide the fate of 
Orleans. Under the leadership of the young girl, 
who by this time they firmly believed to be of more 
than mortal stuff, the men-at-arms fought with the 
courage of enthusiasm; but the position was full 
of difficulty and the walls seemed impregnable. 
Close under them floated the white banner of the 
Maid, and ever and anon her clear voice sounded 
above the tumult. "Be of good cheer, tries braves. 
Do not retreat. The fort will soon be yours." 

About midday, after a brief pause for food, the 
attack was renewed by means of scaling ladders. 
Jeanne was the first to seize one of them and to put 
it against the rampart. As she did so, an arrow 
pierced her shoulder, just over the right breast, in 
such a way that the shaft was half-buried in the 
flesh. Hastily her page and her confessor. Brother 
Pasquerel, carried her a little apart from the fray; 

84 



The Siege of Orleans 

and the Maid, seeing the flow of blood that followed 
the withdrawal of the arrow, wept bitterly like the 
girl she was. 

Dismayed soldiers, crowding round her, suggested 
that charms should be used to stop the bleeding; 
but Jeanne would have none of them. She was 
dreadfully frightened and sure she was going to 
die; but she would rather that, said she, than do 
anything she knew to be contrary to the Will of 
God. 

They took off her heavy armour, and dressed the 
wound with oil, and then mercifully left her for a 
little to herself. Presently she arose from her knees 
with her usual bright face and began to buckle on 
her armour. Her Voices had spoken words of com- 
fort, and she was prepared to forget the smart of her 
wound and begin to fight anew. 

But dusk was approaching, and she found Dunois, 
conscious of his weary and dispirited men, about to 
sound the retreat. "Sound it not!" she cried. 
"You will enter very soon, and the English shall 
have no more power over you." 

He consented to wait a little, while his men rested 
and refreshed themselves; and meantime the Maid 
wandered up the neighbouring hill among the peace- 
ful vineyards, that she might once more try to catch 
some echo of those heavenly voices that had en- 
couraged her before. 

All this time the standard of the Maid had been 
waving before the bulwark; and the Sire d'Aulon, 
one of the French captains, thinking to cheer his 
tired men, bade one of them try to carry it to the 
top of the wall. As he set off to do this Jeanne 

85 



The Sitory of Jeamte d'^^rc 

returned, crying with fresh energy, "Bring up your 
ladders. The English are well nigh done for." 

Catching sight of her standard, she watched its 
course with brightening eyes. Crying to those about 
her, "Look and see when the flag of my standard 
touches the bulwark." 

"Jeanne!" cried one of the lookers-on. "The 
flag touches!" 

"Then enter, for the way is yours," she replied, 
and immediately rushed upon the rampart, followed 
helter-skelter by her host. The English, who had 
so lately seen her wounded and weeping, fled aghast 
before this unexpected attack and retreated to the 
wooden drawbridge by which they hoped to take 
refuge in the fort of the Tourelles itself. But the 
drawbridge was a mass of flames, and gave way 
beneath their feet, so that only a portion of the 
troops managed to cross through a perfect sea of 
fire, only to meet a new contingent from Orleans 
on the farther side. 

Seeing the white, drawn face of their leader, 
Glasdale, the man who had replied to her former 
message with words of foul insult, the pitying heart 
of the Maid prompted her to cry : 

"Yield thee, yield thee, Glasdale, to the King of 
Heaven. You called me an ill name, but I have 
great pity on your soul!" 

But Glasdale with many another had met his doom, 
and was choking out his last breath in the river 
beneath that flaming bridge of horror, while the 
Maid knelt weeping and praying for his soul on the 
wall above. 

So Les Tourelles fell, and with it the English hopes 

86 



The Siege of Orleans 

of taking the city of Orleans. The joy bells that 
pealed out that night over the dark waters of the 
Loire sounded the knell of their hopes of victory in 
Southern France. In less than a week this country 
maiden of seventeen years had accomplished the 
feat which had baffled the wisest soldiers of France 
for seven long months, and had driven the foemen 
from the walls of the beleaguered city. 



87 



Fille Dieu, va, va, 
va; je serai a ton 
aide; va ! (Lea Voix) 

CHAPTER IX: TheChassede 
Pat hay. June 1429 

T[E following day, which was Sunday, saw 
a half-hearted attempt of the baffled Eng- 
lish to recover their prestige by a fight in 
the open. 

*'In the dawn the English came out of their tents 
and arrayed themselves in order of battle. Thereon 
the Maid rose from bed, and for all armour wore a 
coat of mail." 

But Jeanne was not to be induced to break the 
Sabbath rest without necessity. Says Dunois, now 
her admiring chronicler, "The Maid willed that none 
should attack the English." Instead she bade him 
set up in full view of both armies an altar, where 
Mass was celebrated with full ceremonies in the 
open air by the riverside. Both friend and foemen 
bent the knee in worship, and directly it was over, 
the Maid asked eagerly, "Which way are their faces 
turned now.^*" "They are turned away towards 
Meun" — (a town farther down the river). 

"Let them go! The Lord will give them to you 
another time," she said; and so they were allowed 
to retire in orderly fashion upon Meun and Jargeau 
and the other towns still held by them upon the 
Loire. 

Two days later Jeanne, though barely recovered 



The C basse de Pathay 

from her wound, rode into Tours to interview the 
Dauphin. Her wish was to induce him to go at once 
to Rheims for his coronation, and thus to fulfil the 
divine command that was for ever ringing in her 
ears. But she found him listless and indolent as 
ever; stirred for a minute perhaps by her invigorat- 
ing appearance, but content, as usual, to wait for a 
*'more convenient time." 

Banner in hand she met him face to face as she 
rode into Tours. Says an eyewitness, "The Maid 
bowed to her saddle-bow, and the King bade her sit 
erect; it was thought he would have liked to embrace 
her, so glad he was." 

For a brief time all went well, and under the 
influence of Gerson, the supposed author of the 
Imitation of Christ, and Gelu, Archbishop of Em- 
brun, the Dauphin could scarcely indulge in 
doubts and fears. 

For the wise Gerson said of her, "If France deserts 
her, and she fails, she is none the less inspired," and 
the Archbishop solemnly declared, "We piously 
believe her to be the Angel of the armies of the 
Lord." 

But the influence of less far-seeing counsellors 
prevailed in the end. The precious days slipped 
away, and in spite of the Maid's piteous cry, "I shall 
only last a year; take the good of me as long as you 
can," nothing was done. At length Jeanne could 
stand it no longer. Giving her quick boyish knock 
at the Council Chamber door, within which the 
Dauphin was holding one of his interminable col- 
loquies with his advisers, the Maid marched in, and 
kneeling before him, cried, "Noble Dauphin, why do 

89 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

you hold such long councils? Come you to Rheims 
and receive your worthy crown." 

"Is such the command of your Voices?" asked one 
of the councillors. 

"Yes; they chiefly insist on it," she replied. 

"Will you not tell us, in the presence of the 
King, the nature of these Voices?" he asked 
curiously. 

She flushed up shyly, for a girl of seventeen is 
not wont to speak readily of sacred and intimate 
things. Then she said quietly, "I will tell you 
willingly if you wish to know." 

"It is only if you are willing," said the Dauphin, 
who, with all his faults, was a gentleman, in a 
kindly voice. 

"It is thus,'* she said. *'When I am grieved be- 
cause folic will not believe me, I am used to go apart 
and to complain to my Lord; and then I hear a 
Voice saying to me, 'Fille Dieu, va, va, va; je serai 
a ton aide; va!'' When I hear that Voice I am 
very glad, and would listen to it for ever." 

And as she spoke she raised to heaven her shining 
eyes in a gaze which was full of hope and joy and 
clear vision of things unseen. 

So presently she gained from the Dauphin a 
promise that he would proceed to Rheims if once the 
road was freed from danger and the English driven 
from the Loire. 

Rejoicing to be free from the enervating atmosphere 
of the Court, Jeanne at once made her preparations 
for the campaign. It is as she was ready to start 
from the neighbouring town of Selles that we get 
a vivid picture of her, in a letter written to his 

90 



The Chasse de Pathay 

mother by the Sieur de Laval, a Breton noble, who 
had lately offered his services and loyalty to the 
Dauphin. 

" She left Selles on Monday at the hour of vespers. 
I saw her mount her horse, all in white armour 
except the head, a little axe in her hand. The 
great black charger was very restive and would not 
let her mount. 'Lead him to the Cross,' she cried; 
'it stands on the road in front of the Church.' 
There he stood fast, as though he had been bound, 
while she mounted. Then turning towards the 
Church gate she cried in her girlish tones, ' You priests 
and people of the Church, make processions and 
prayers to God for us'; then turning to the road, 
'Forward!' she said. Her unfolded standard was 
carried by a page; she had her little axe in her hand, 
and by her side rode a brother who had joined her 
eight days before. To-day d'Alengon was to join 
the Maid." 

The last named was Jeanne's special favourite, as 
we have seen, and she had hard work to get his 
young wife to let him go again to the wars. 
"Fear nothing, Madame," she had said reassur- 
ingly, "I will bring him back to you safe and 
sound." 

And as theyrode along the road to Orleans, with 
high hopes and intentions, while from time to time 
they were joined by fresh troops, new contingents 
hastily raised from the country-side by those who 
until now had given up all hope of saving their fair 
land of France from the English foe. 

Those June days were full of triumph for the Maid. 
When before the walls of Jargeau, whither the 

91 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

English had retreated, the leaders who accompanied 
her were seized with their old disease of hesitation 
and delay, it was she who settled the matter by 
snatching her banner from the hands of the reluctant 
page, and, setting it below the battlements, cheered 
on her men to the assault. "Are ye afraid?" she 
cried to d ' Alengon, aghast at this method of warfare. 
*'Do you not know that I promised your wife to 
bring you back safe and sound .^ Forward, gentle 
duke, to the assault!" 

She did not forget her promise. "Change your 
position! That gun will kill you!" she suddenly 
shouted to the young duke; and sure enough, a few 
minutes later one who had taken his place met his 
death there. 

As she climbed a scaling-ladder in her impetuous 
haste, waving her banner aloft, a stone crashed down 
from the battlements and struck her to the earth. 
There was a moment's pause among the soldiers, 
who had followed up her progress with growing 
enthusiasm; but in a moment she had sprung lightly 
to her feet, crying, "On, on, my friends. The Lord 
has given the English into our hands. Within an 
hour they are ours!" 

The result of that brave speech may be seen in 
d'Alen9on's own words. 

"In an instant the town was taken; the English 
fled to the bridges; over a thousand men were slain 
in the pursuit." 

Two days later the Maid announced that she 
"wished to pay a visit to the English at Meun." 
Meun was taken, and Beaugency was deserted at 
the mere rumour of her approach, the English 

92 



The Chasse de Pat hay 

crowding into the castle, which at once she pro- 
ceeded to besiege. And there befell an adventure 
which underlines not the least remarkable part of 
the Maid's character — her power of dealing wisely 
with men old in the ways of courts and camps, who 
would seem naturally to have been absolutely beyond 
her sphere. 

Before Beaugency there had just appeared in full 
force the Count de Richemont, Constable of France, 
whom the hatred of La Tremouille, the King 's adviser, 
had driven into exile, and into enmity with Charles, 
though he still held his troops in reserve to fight 
against the English if necessary. This great noble- 
man, having heard with contemptuous disgust of the 
exploits of this 'milkmaid of Domr^my,' had be- 
thought himseK that it was but fitting that he 
should put himself at the head of affairs now that 
things had come to such a pass, if only to put down 
an influence that must be due to witchcraft alone, a 
"thing he hated more than any man, and had burned 
more witches in France than any other of his time." 

The news of his approach roused something like 
an uproar among the royalist forces. D'Alengon 
openly declared that he would throw up his com- 
mand if Richemont were allowed to join the army; 
at which the Maid sprang upon her horse and called 
upon the captains to follow her, for she was "going 
to fight the Constable." D'Alengon and La Hire 
obeyed; others hung back, muttering, "There be 
some of us in your company who love the Con- 
stable better than all the Maids in France." 

But Jeanne knew better than to throw away the 
chance of a good ally; there were other ways of 

93 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

'fighting' known to her, more sure of winning 
over a foe than by use of the sword. As they rode, 
they suddenly came upon the great man in full 
array, whereupon "the Maid dismounted and em- 
braced his knees." 

"Jeanne," he said in his rough but not unkindly 
tones, as he stood looking down at the young face 
upturned to his, "they tell me you want to fight me. 
Now I know not if you are from God or not; if you 
are, I do not fear you, and if you are from the Devil, 
I fear you still less." 

"Brave Constable," she replied "you have not 
come here for my sake, but since you are here, you 
are welcome." 

In face of such frank behaviour, how could 
d'Alengon sulk in his tents .^^ A friendship was 
patched up between him and de Richemont, and the 
flight of the English from that quarter was the 
immediate result of the increased strength of the 
allied forces. 

It was while they were in full retreat toward 
Paris that Jeanne experienced her first battle on 
the open field. 

The French were by no means eager for this, 
since, thus far, they had invariably met with defeat 
under those conditions; but the leader would not 
hear of delay or retreat. "In God's name, we must 
fight them; if they were hanging from the clouds 
we should still have them. This will be the greatest 
victory ever gained for the King." 

It is said that the two armies, hidden from 
one another by the thick low woods of the plain of 
the Beauce, came upon each other almost by chance. 

94 



The Chasse de Pathay 

A stag had been roused by the French scouts, and 
fled in its terror right into the EngHsh camp. 
Strong in their sporting instinct, the EngHsh raised 
the view-hallo and shot at the animal, thus be- 
traying their whereabouts to the scouts of the 
enemy. 

At once the French army prepared to rush upon 
the foe, though still with inward trepidation. 

*'What will be the issue of the fight?" d'Alengon 
asked the Maid. "Have you good spurs .f*" she 
answered with her ready smile. 

"What! shall we turn our backs and flee?" 
cried the bystanders. 

"Not so! But the English will not defend them- 
selves, and you will need good spurs to follow up 
their flight." 

She was right, as usual. The English fled before 
the determined onrush of the French; Sir John 
Fastolf, their leader, "who would fain have thrown 
himself into the fight," was obliged to follow them; 
and Talbot, the Enghsh general, was taken prisoner 
and brought before Jeanne, d'Alenpon, and the 
Constable. 

"You did not expect this when you got up this 
morning!" jeered d'Alengon, mindful of his English 
prison. 

"It is the fortune of war!" replied the soldier. 

Probably Jeanne's eyes were full of pity as she 
gazed at him. We know that she hated the after- 
math of battle and siege. Says her page of her on 
the very occasion of the Battle of Pathay: "She 
was most pitiful at the sight of so great a slaughter. 
A Frenchman was leading some English prisoners; 

95 



The Story of Jeanne d^Arc 

he struck one of them on the head; the man fell 
senseless. Jeanne sprang from her saddle and held 
the Englishman's head on her lap, comforting him; 
and he was shriven." 

Had the Maid marched straight upon Paris after 
the Chasse de Pathay, it would seem as though all 
France must have been hers; but still she must 
be faithful to the Divine Voices which said that the 
King must be crowned at Rheims, and spoke no 
word of Paris. The hardest thing was not to fight 
but to stir up the Dauphin to action, and that was 
still to tax her utmost strength. 



96 



Consilio firmata Dei 

(Motto upon the Coronation 
Medal struck for Jeanne d' Arc) 

CHAPTER X: The Coronation 
at Rheims. July 1 7//^, 1429 

JEANNE'S greatest difficulties came always by 
way, not of open foes, but of her pretended 
friends. It had been comparatively easy to 
chase the English headlong from the cities of the 
Loire; but it was no light matter to get the Dauphin 
to follow up the advantage she had won for him 
and to march to Rheims for his coronation. 

Hastening to him after the battle of Pathay, she 
was received by him with the utmost courtesy and 
kindness. *'I pity you because of the sufferings 
you have endured," he said, and with smooth words 
urged her to rest, to take things more calmly hence- 
forth — in short, to take a leaf out of the royal book, 
and laissez-faire! 

No wonder the impetuous Maid wept tears of 
sheer vexation at such conduct; and then, bethink- 
ing herself with that sound common sense of hers 
that the King's hesitation could only be due to want 
of confidence in her success, she set to work to 
cheer him. 

"Have no doubt! you shall receive the whole of 
your kingdom and shall shortly be crowned." 

Then she tried her best to effect a reconciliation 
between her royal master and the Constable, who 
had certainly earned some recognition for his good 
aid. Here, too, she failed. La Tremouille, the King's 

97 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

fatal genius, was at his elbow, and de Richemont, 
his ancient foe, was dismissed with ignominy. It 
is much to his credit that, instead of abandoning 
the cause of his ungrateful King, the Constable 
proceeded to carry on an energetic campaign in 
Normandy. 

Meantime the Dauphin, now at Gien, held a long 
ten days' Council as to whether it was safe, or even 
expedient, to undertake the march to Rheims. At 
this Jeanne became really restive. When they 
pointed out the dangers on the road, she replied 
shortly, *'I know all that!" and, with pardon- 
able temper, *'left the town in sheer vexation, and 
bivouacked in the field two days before the 
departure of the King." 

At length, on the 29th of June, the army set out 
for Rheims and met its first important check five 
days later at the gates of the city of Troyes, held, 
and strongly held, by a hostile Burgundian garrison. 
This was a serious matter of debate for a King who 
loved to talk rather than to act. Should they 
push on, leaving a dangerous enemy at their back.f* 
Or should they attack a well-fortified and well- 
provisioned town.f^ 

So the councillors and captains talked on, revolving 
one plan after another, some of them wild enough, 
none of them practically convincing; and it was left 
to the Seigneur de Treves, no friend of Jeanne's in 
former days, to point out that the one great essential 
to these Councils had been carefully excluded. 

*'The King's expedition had not been undertaken 
because of the strength of his army, nor yet because 
of the probability of his success; but it had been 

98 



The Coronation at Rheims 

set on foot at the urgent moving of Jeanne, who 
told him that he should be crowned at Rheims, and 
should find little resistance, since such was the will 
of God. 

"If, therefore, Jeanne is not to be allowed to give 
her advice at the present crisis, it is my opinion that 
we should turn back." 

So to the perplexed assembly presently enters 
the Maid, with her quick boyish knock and fearless 
gaze; and when the Archbishop of Rheims, as 
spokesman, points out the difficulties that face 
them and the advantage of retreat — - 

"Shall I be believed if I speak.?" says Jeanne, 
with scarcely curbed impatience, turning to the 
King. 

"If you have anything profitable and reasonable 
to tell us, you will be trusted." 

"Gentle Dauphin, if you will wait for two days, 
Troyes shall be yours." 

Cried the Archbishop in amazement, "Jeanne, we 
would gladly wait for six days if we were sure to 
get the town. But are we sure.^^" 

"Doubt it not!" rephed the Maid. 

All that night Jeanne, having obtained a reluctant 
permission to act, toiled and organized and issued her 
commands. In the dusk of the morning her shrill 
girlish voice was heard by the citizens of Troyes, 
trembling within their walls, ringing out in the cry, 
"To the Assault!" 

It was enough; the townsfolk, headed by their 
Bishop, issued from their gates and proffered their 
submission to the King; the city of Troyes was won. 

Terror of the innocent Maid, whom they thought 

99 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

a fiend come straight from hell, seems to have 
brought the men of Troyes to their knees; for they 
proceeded to send to her a certain Brother Richard, 
a noted preacher of the place, in the hope that he 
would exorcise the Evil One. 

It must have been a strange and almost ludicrous 
scene: the friar, in his rough brown habit, advanc- 
ing with doubtful gaze and lagging steps upon the 
White Maid, whose bright young face, framed by 
the short straight hair, shone above her glittering 
armour. The rough crowd surges around, breath- 
less with excitement; the friar advances closer, and 
suddenly flings a handful of holy water over her, to 
drive away the fiend. Jeanne's merry laugh rings 
out. "Come on and fear nothing! I shall not fly 
away!" she cries. 

And immediately Brother Richard and the timor- 
ous citizens accept her, and soon are her warmest 
friends and admirers. 

On she led the army, growing larger day by day, 
to Chalons, where the keys of the town were at once 
delivered up. Here she met a Domremy man, 
and from their conversation we get a hint of the 
gnawing anxiety that she hid so well under her 
appearance of gay confidence. 

*'Do you not fear these battles, these sieges?" 
he asked. And she answered very gravely, "I fear 
naught but treason." 

On July 16th she rode with the Dauphin in triumph 
into Rheims; and early the next day the coronation 
took place. An eyewitness tells in a letter how it 
was "a right fair thing to see that fair mystery, 
for it was as solemn and as well-adorned with all 



The Coronation at Rheims 

things thereto pertaining as if it had been ordered a 
year before." First, all in armour and with banners 
displayed, the marshal and the admiral, with a 
great company, rode to meet the Abbot who brought 
the vessel containing the sacred oil. They rode into 
the minster and alighted at the entrance to the 
choir. The Archbishop of Rheims administered the 
Coronation Oath; he crowned and anointed the 
King; while all the people cried, "Noel!" *'The 
trumpets sounded so that you might think the 
roofs would be rent. And always during that 
Mystery, the Maid stood next the King, her standard 
in her hand. A right fair thing it was to see the 
goodly manners of the King and the Maid." 

When the Dauphin had been crowned and con- 
secrated, the Maid bent and embraced his knees, 
weeping for joy and saying these words: "Gentle 
King, now is accomplished the Will of God, who 
decreed that I should raise the siege of Orleans, 
and bring you to this city of Rheims to receive your 
solemn sacring, thereby showing that you are true 
King, and that France should be yours." 

"And right great pity came upon all those who 
saw her, and many wept."^ 

The task of Jeanne d'Arc, as given her by her 
Voices, had been accomplished, and up to that 
moment nothing but the most extraordinary success 
had been hers. 

She had first seen the Dauphin in the early days of 
March, when, from the most sanguine point of view, 
the fact of his coronation seemed utterly remote. 
By the middle of July, in spite of the most weari- 

1 Andrew Lang, The Maid of France. 
lOI 



The Story of Jeanne d^Arc 

some and unnecessary delay and waste of time on 
his part, the road to Rheims had been cleared, France 
south of the Loire was saved, and the Dauphin was 
crowned King. 

And now that her special work was done, Jeanne 
pleaded that she might go back to her mother in 
Domremy. Her father she had recently seen, for he 
had dome to Rheims, with her 'uncle,' and some 
other peasants from her native place, to see for him- 
self the truth of the reports which must have seemed 
to him truly amazing. 

He sees his little Jeanne, the girl he had threatened 
to drown rather than see her ride among men-at- 
arms, the chosen companion, not of the rough soldiers 
indeed, but of a King, of princes, dukes and noble 
captains. The present of money given him by Charles 
impressed him, but his slow peasant mind prob- 
ably never quite realized the great work that his 
daughter had already accomplished. No doubt he 
told her, in answer to her eager questions, of her 
mother's longings and fears for her absent child; 
and that is why the tender-hearted Maid wept and 
besought the King that she might return to help with 
the sheep in the old home at Domremy. 

But Jeanne was by this time far too precious to 
be spared from active duty; and although she 
apparently realized that she was no longer fulfilling 
an actual divine behest, she was far too loyal, too 
enthusiastic, possibly also, too doubtful of the 
King's conduct unless she were there to incite to 
action, to shrink from continuing her work of 
delivering her country from the English. Certainly 
it was no worldly ambition that urged her on, for 

102 



The Coronation at Rheims 

again and again she echoes the same mournful 
Httle cry, "Make the most of me, for I shall last 
but a year!" 

Yet, strangely enough, it seemed as though the 
fulfilment of the actual letter of her task showed 
the high-water mark of her success. From the 
moment of that consecration at Rheims, with its 
bring colours and flashing banners and clash of 
sword, with the sunshine lighting up the jewels of 
the crown and touching the head of the Maid as 
she stood with flushed cheeks and eyes bright with 
tears at the side of her King, a cloud began to creep 
over her young life, a cloud that was to grow darker 
as the months passed by, till it burst in thunder 
over a scaffold and a stake. 



103 



Renty! Renty! to the 
King of Heaven! 

(Jeanne's war-cry before Paris) 

CHAPTER XI: The Siege of 
Paris. September 1429 

THE blaze of light that shone upon the 
coronation scene had faded away. Jeanne, 
with many tears, had said farewell to her 
father and uncle, and left the former to return to 
Domremy, his unaccustomed mind still ruffled and 
aghast at the strange sights he had seen in Rheims, 
but his toil-worn hand grasping very tightly the 
two tangible proofs, as far as he was concerned, of 
his daughter's success. For one was the purse of 
money that had been given him; and the other 
was a patent of exemption from all kinds of tax 
and tribute for the villages of Domremy and Greuse. 

He had seen his young daughter for the last time. 
When he next heard news of her, news of imprison- 
ment and of trial, Jacques d'Arc remembered his 
former doubts and fears, and after sullen pondering 
forbade his weeping wife to name the girl to him 
from that time forth. The news of her execution 
seems to have broken his heart, for he died very 
shortly afterwards. 

Meantime, Jeanne had before her the supremely 
difficult task of rousing a helpless, inert King to 
follow up the advantage she had won for him, and 
to advance upon Paris and the cities of the north. 

Much time was wasted, and the Maid, in her 
young impatience, always hated delay. There was 

J 04 



The Siege of Paris 

a fatal theory in the mind of Charles that if he could 
but secure the alliance of the Duke of Burgundy all 
would be well; and Burgundy, probably in contempt 
of his weakness, was ready enough to dupe him, to 
make a false truce, to encourage him to delay, that 
he might the more easily crush him in the end. 

Even the Maid, though wary and on her guard 
against him, was inclined to strain a point to gain 
the allegiance of the Duke, and the more because, 
from this time forth, the directions she had received 
from her Voices began to grow vague and indistinct. 

"Fear not, for God will aid you," was the tenor 
of their message in these days, which pointed to the 
presence of some danger, more or less definite, but 
gave no clear command as to what course to pursue. 

On the very day of the Coronation she had written 
one of her simple, almost boyish, letters to Burgundy. 
"Jeanne the Maid desires you, in the name of the 
King of Heaven, her true Lord, to make a long, good, 

and assured peace with the King of France 

All those who fight against his holy kingdom, fight 
against the Lord Jesus, King of Heaven, and of the 
whole world. I pray and beseech you with joined 
hands, fight not against us any more." 

But it was not the letter of the Maid that brought 
envoys from the Duke to E,heims, envoys who were 
laughing in their sleeves as they laid their master's 
pretended proposals of peace before the King, and 
thus gained time to allow Bedford to enter Paris 
with his army, and Burgundy to pitch his camp 
in the neighbourhood of Amiens. A quick and 
decided march upon the capital, then undefended, 
would have brought it into Charles's hands. As it 

105 



The Story of Jeanne cPArc 

was lie had lost his chance. The citizens had been 
inflamed against him by a report that he meant to 
order a general massacre; they turned to Bedford 
as their saviour, and fortified themselves against 
their King. 

Meantime the persuasions of Jeanne had at length 
brought about a move. "The Maid," says a writer 
of the time, "caused the King to advance on Paris." 

But at the first hint of opposition, without even 
approaching the important town of Compiegne, pre- 
pared as it was to surrender, the coward Charles 
"turned his flank and then the rear of his army 
towards Paris, and dragging with him the reluctant 
Maid, headed for the Loire." 

His excuse was the chance of Burgundy's alliance, 
in which case he might surrender Paris to the King. 
Charles must have known the utter improbability of 
this; and Jeanne's feelings on the subject may best 
be gathered from a letter written, "on the Paris 
road," to her friends at Rheims. 

"Dear and good friends, good and loyal French- 
men, the Maid sends you news of her. Never will I 
abandon you while I live. True it is that the King 
has made him a fifteen days' truce with the Duke of 
Burgundy, who is to give up to him the town of 
Paris on the fifteenth day. 

"Although the truce is made, I am not content and 
am not certain that I will keep it. If I do, it will be 
merely for sake of the King's honour, and in case 
they do not deceive the blood royal, for I will keep 
the King's army together and in readiness, at the 
end of the fifteen days, if peace is not made." 

Her keen mind had grasped the hollowness of 

io6 



The Siege of Paris 

such truces: and she was one of those who most 
rejoiced when the retreat to the Loire was suddenly 
cut off by a combined army of EngKsh and Bur- 
gundian alHes, so that they were forced to march 
back toward Paris. 

It was while Jeanne was riding between Dunois 
and the Archbishop of Rheims on this road that we 
catch a remark of the Maid's that shows how far 
she was from merely seeking glory for its own sake. 
She had been joyfully pointing out to her companions 
the loyal nature of the peasants of the surrounding 
country. "Here is a good people! Never have 
I seen any so glad of the coming of the noble 
King. Would that I, when my time comes, were 
so fortunate as to be buried in their country!" 

*'In what place do you expect to die, Jeanne?" 
asked the Archbishop with curiosity. 

"Where God pleases," she said very simply. *'I 
know not the hour nor the place any more than you. 
And would it were God's pleasure that I might now 
lay down my arms and go back to serve my father 
and my mother in keeping their sheep; they would 
be right glad to see me." 

White as snow, pure as a spring flower in her 
sweet simplicity as she rides between the hardened 
soldier and the worldly ecclesiastic, it is no wonder 
that the rough men-at-arms worshipped her, that the 
chivalrous young knights were proud to serve her. 

But what was the English idea of the Maid who 
had already so effectively weakened their hold on 
France .f^ 

A letter to the King from Bedford at this time 
taunts him with leading about with him "a dis- 

107 



The Story of Jeanne d^Arc 

orderly woman dressed as a man." In later days he 
speaks of the cause of the English defeats as being 
the "unlawful doubt the soldiers had of a disciple 
of the Fiend, called the Pucelle, that used false 
enchantment and sorcery. A woman of ill-character 
and a witch!" 

It is seldom indeed that the eyes of the hostile 
world can pierce the disguise of outward things and 
discern the hidden saint; but in Jeanne's case the 
transformation of both appearance and character 
is almost grotesque, even in the eyes of one whose 
sight was dimmed by malice and resentment. 

In the days that followed it was the great aim of 
the Maid to bring about an engagement in the open 
field; but the English kept fast within their earth- 
works and walled cities and would not risk an action. 

"When the Maid saw," we read, "that the Enghsh 
would not sally forth, she rode standard in hand to 
the front and smote the English palisade." 

But this had no effect, and, beyond some slight 
skirmishes, nothing was done until Bedford's army 
moved north into Normandy, when Compiegne was 
at once taken by Jeanne's host. This town, situated 
on the left bank of the Oise, and on the road to Paris, 
was in a very important position, and its surrender 
was followed by that of several others in that district. 
If only the King would have bestirred himself, it 
would have been an excellent base from which to 
have marched on Paris; but this seemed such a 
hopeless matter that, as usual, Jeanne determined 
to act on her own initiative. "Good Duke," she 
cried to her friend d'Alen§on, "prepare your troops 
and those of the other captains. By my staff, if 

io8 



The Siege of Paris 

God wills it, I will see Paris nearer than I have seen 
it yet." 

So these two, with their troops at their back, set 
forth on the long straight road, riding recklessly in 
their high spirits and hopes, and so reached St 
Denys, the cathedral of which was held especially 
sacred by Jeanne, since it held the tombs of all the 
kings and queens of France. 

Here they waited for a fortnight for the laggard 
Charles, whose tardy appearance was hailed with 
joy by the soldiers. "She will lead the King into 
Paris if he will let her," they cried. 

At first there seemed small chance of it, and we 
hear that "the Maid was in sorrow for the King's 
long tarrying at Compi^gne; and it seemed that he 
was content, in his usual way, with the grace that 
God had done him, and would make no further 
enterprise." 

It was only, indeed, after the Parisians had been 
given ample time to strengthen their fortifications, 
and the patience and courage of his own army were 
fast ebbing away, that he gave permission to Jeanne 
to lead the forces that were under her special direc- 
tion to attack the city. He himself, meantime, 
retired to Senlis with the main body of the troops, 
and refused to show himself before the walls, in 
spite of the urgent entreaty of d'Alengon and the 
Maid. 

The attack upon Paris was made between the gates 
of St Honor6 and St Denys, about two o'clock in 
the afternoon. 

It was a hopeless matter from the first. The Maid 
knew that the nobles who pretended to support her 

109 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

were less than half-hearted in the fight. "She 
herself," she said, "was determined to go further 
and pass the fosses." But she had no divine 
directions on the matter to encourage her brave 
heart; she could but do her best. 

The walls were protected by two moats, the inner 
one full of water, the outer dry. For all that long 
afternoon the Maid stood on the ridge between the 
two, under a hail of arrows, waving her tattered 
banner and crying her favourite war-cry to the 
foemen on the walls, "Renty! Renty! to the 
King of Heaven!" 

Her own men seemed to have kept for the most 
part well out of range of the firing, and so escaped 
with scarcely any loss; but a despairing note must 
have entered into that girlish voice as the hours 
went by, and still they held back from the attack. 
"She called out that the place was theirs for the 
winning"; and they preferred an inglorious post of 
safety. 

Still, however, the Maid stood there alone with 
her standard-bearer, in her worn and dinted armour, 
until, as dusk drew on, she was wounded in the leg 
by a Burgundian arrow, almost at the moment that 
the ensign fell dead at her side. They tried to carry 
her away, but she would not go farther than a place 
of cover beside the moat, from whence, through the 
gathering darkness, she still gave forth her pathetic 
appeal to her men to charge and "take the place 
that was theirs for the winning." They would not 
hear her, and a blackness of discouragement darker 
than the night fell upon Maid and men alike. Some 
say the latter "cursed their Pucelle who had told 

no 





'JEANNE WOUNDED BEFORE PAUIS"— i^af/e JIO 



The Siege of Paris 

them that certainly they would storm Paris, and 
that all who resisted would be put to the sword or 
burned in their houses." 

This is the report of one of those within the city 
who could only have heard it from those outside, 
as he was engaged on the following day in helping 
to carry off the dead Burgundians for burial; but 
one can see in it a sign of the growing jubilation of 
the foes, and the increasing disloyalty among the 
forces of the Maid. Yet it was no fault of Jeanne's 
that the attack had not been pressed to the point of 
success. 

*'What a pity! What a pity!" is her repeated 
sigh, as against her will she lets herself be carried 
back to the camp. *'If they had but gone on till 
morning, the inhabitants would have known." 

Next morning, in spite of her wound, which was 
but slight, she was up and ready once more for 
the fray. *'I shall not stir from here till Paris be 
taken!" she announced. The downcast spirits of 
the men-at-arms were stirred as much by her brave 
words as by the sight of a small reinforcement under 
the Sieur de Montmorency, come to "take service 
under the banner of the Maid." 

Preparations were made, and the march begun to 
the walls, when suddenly another little band of 
riders appeared at their side. The cheers of the 
soldiers were checked; these were no new allies but 
messengers from the King, bearing peremptory orders 
that the siege be stopped at once. "The Maid must 
return to St Denys." 

The disappointment was heart-breaking. For a 
moment d'Alenyon encouraged her by the reminder 

III 



The Story of Jeanne d^Arc 

that lie had constructed a bridge across the Seine, 
near St Denys, from which a most advantageous 
position for fresh attack was gained. Alas! they 
were to find that Charles, in his determination not 
to fight, had ordered the bridge to be destroyed 
during the night. 

It was a fatal policy, for not only was Paris hope- 
lessly lost, but the main body of the army, not able 
to realize the criminal weakness and cowardice of 
their King, saw in this ignominious retreat nothing 
but a proof of the failure of the Maid to keep her 
promises. 

And since we have the testimony of the English 
Bedford himself to the fact that hitherto the disasters 
of the English had been due "in great part, I trow, 
to the Pucelle, who withdrew their courage in a 
marvellous wise, and encouraged your adverse party 
and enemy to assemble themselves forthwith in 
greater number," it is clear that anything that 
belittled Jeanne in the eyes of the army was a fatal 
blow struck at the success of France. 

When the retreat began in earnest, the Maid 
begged to be allowed to stay behind, probably in 
the hope of renewing the attack by means of the 
free lances she might attract to her side. In this 
she had divine authority. "My Voices bade me 
remain at St Denys and I desired to remain; but 
the seigneurs took me away in spite of myself. If I 
had not been wounded, I should never have left." 

Before she left the place, she one day slipped 
quietly into the Cathedral and laid her suit of white 
armour, now all dinted and tarnished by warfare, 
upon the altar of Our Lady. Was it, as some think, 

112 



The Siege of Paris 

a sign that she had done her work and could hope 
no longer for success? Yet soon we find her once 
more in the front of the battle, cheering on her men 
as usual; and hopefulness was ever her strongest 
characteristic. 

It is more likely that in her talks with her divine 
companions she had learnt the true secret of inward 
peace, and after offering up, under the emblem of 
her tarnished armour, her disappointments and dis- 
couragements, came forth again, strong in spiritual 
might, to do her duty whatever might befall. 



113 



Jeanne, Jeanne, tu 
seras prise avant la 
Saint- Jean (Lea Vok) 

CHAPTER XII: Inaction 
and Failure. Autumn 1429— 
Spring 1430 

IT was a silent and downcast Maid that un- 
willingly accompanied the craven King on his 
return march through the fertile plains south 
of the Loire. Little by little the victorious army 
she had so blithely led melted away, until at Gien 
the last remnants of it were formally disbanded by 
Charles. In vain did Jeanne point out the need of 
fresh conquests, of relief that should be brought to 
those loyal towns that at any time now might fall 
a prey to English attacks. D'Alenyon, her gallant 
comrade, was dismissed, and rode home, not un- 
willing, to his waiting wife, when he found that 
he could hope no longer for a repetition of those 
wild free gallops into the heart of the enemy's 
forces, with the bright-faced Maid at his side. 
One by one her captains faded away from the 
Court; "and thus," says the Chronicler, "was the 
will of the Maid and the royal army broken." 

That autumn of the year 1429 was one of sad 
and gloomy inaction for Jeanne. She must have 
heard with bitter regret of the abandonment of St 
Denys by the disheartened garrison and of the 
sacrilegious pillaging of the Cathedral, from which 

114 



Inaction and Failure 

her own little suit of armour, so recently offered, 
was carried off by the English and sent in triumph 
to the King of England. 

She must have heard with equal indignation of 
the councils held daily within the walls of Paris, 
the Paris for which she had been ready to shed her 
last drop of blood, the "heart of the mystic body 
of the kingdom"; of the deliberating of the Duke of 
Bedford and the Bishop of Winchester with the 
Duke of Burgundy, whom the more powerful citizens 
claimed as the true regent of their city. 

She must have heard with grief and dismay of the 
agreement made between them by which Burgundy 
was to hold Paris, not as regent, but as Bedford's 
lieutenant, in return for which he was to bring an 
army at Easter against those loyal towns within 
the He de France district which had held firm to 
Charles. 

Meantime, Burgundy, having completed his all too 
easy truce with the latter, could retire in peace to 
Flanders, leaving Paris in the hands of his favourite 
captain, and regardless of the murmurs of the 
citizens there deserted by their idol, could give all 
his attention to his approaching marriage with a 
fair princess of Portugal. 

No doubt the keen eyes of the Maid saw that 
had it not been for that ill-judged truce, the fruit 
of cowardice and inertia, this would have been the 
very hour for her crowning victory, and Paris, 
left almost unguarded, would have fallen an easy 
prey. But Charles would pay no heed to her words, 
being now absorbed in his reunion with the Queen, 
who at that time joined the Court and made her 

115 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

abode at Bourges. Here Jeanne was well lodged 
and looked after, and was apparently in high favour 
with the royal pair. As long as she did not insist 
on fighting, Charles was complaisant enough, liking 
indeed to spend money on her apparel and to dress 
her in fine clothes as became a Maid of France. 

"He gave her a mantle of gold, open at both 
sides, to wear over her armour" it was afterwards 
declared, and at her trial they added that she was 
fond and proud of her gay clothes. What harm 
indeed if she were, seeing that, with all her success 
as a warrior, she was still but a simple-hearted girl 
of seventeen? 

In one sense indeed these days of enforced idle- 
ness were full of petty triumphs for the Maid, had 
she cared to realize the fact. The people of the 
town openly wore the medals struck in her honour, 
on which, at the Coronation, was engraved the motto, 
'Sustained by the counsel of God.' And the Duke 
of Milan, writing to suggest that she should come 
to his aid in recovering his lost lands, called her 
"That very honourable and devout maid Jeanne, 
sent by the King of Heaven for the extirpation of 
the English tyranny in France." 

Such things had no satisfaction for Jeanne amid 
the soul-wearying monotony of Court life. She 
avoided them whenever she could, stealing away to 
quiet little churches or the dim chapels of the great 
Cathedral, there to pray and to ask for clearer 
counsel as to her future. 

Sometimes the women of the town would bring 
their rosaries to her, as she knelt with upturned 
face, that she might hallow them by her touch; 

ii6 



Inaction and Failure 

but there was no mock sanctity, no pretence about 
the Maid. 

"Touch them yourselves; they will get as much 
good from your touch as from mine," she would 
declare, with boyish directness. But she loved to 
scatter her largesse among the poor, and, as the 
good lady with whom she was lodged gave em- 
phatic evidence in later days, "She was very simple 
and innocent, knowing nothing, except in affairs 
of war." 

Then, almost suddenly, came news most welcome 
to the Maid. It had dawned upon the advisers of 
the King that the town of La Charit6, on the Upper 
Loire, would be the future centre from which the 
English army under the boy-King, Henry VI, bound 
to arrive at latest by the following Easter, would 
harass the loyal French territory, while safeguard- 
ing Paris. 

So La Charite must be taken, and Jeanne was the 
only leader who could be trusted to achieve that 
end. She had a companion in command, one 
d'Albret, but, as contemporary records repeatedly 
avow, she was officially recognized as "leading the 
hosts of the King." 

It was a trifling drawback to the Maid that neither 
troops, ammunition, nor money were forthcoming 
for this important attack. Bravely she set to work 
to raise the same in the neighbouring towns and 
villages, and the people, in admiration of her pluck 
and spirit, gave what they could, and added, over 
and above, a sword and two battle-axes for her whom 
they called the 'Messenger of God.' 

Her first attack was on the town of St Pierre-le- 
117 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

Moutier and was discouraging enough at the outset. 
Driven back from the walls, the hastily gathered 
troops fled in great confusion and, to the dismay 
of d' Anion, the gallant gentleman who was at the 
head of the Maid's own military household, Jeanne 
was left beneath the wall with only four or five men, 
amongst whom were probably her two brothers. 

Wounded as he was, d'Aulon managed to mount 
a horse and rode- hastily back to her. 

"What are you doing?" he cried. "Why do you 
not retreat with the rest.f* What can you do here 
all alone. f*" 

To which the Maid replied in memorable words: 

" I am not alone. I have fifty thousand on my side, 
and I will not retreat until I have taken this town." 

To d'Aulon's mind the idea of the 'spiritual 
hosts' that were so clear to Jeanne's eyes was in- 
conceivable. "Whatever she might say she had 
only four or five men with her," he reported, "as I 
know for certain and so do several others v/ho were 
looking on; so I urged her to retire like the rest. 
Then she bade me tell the men to bring faggots and 
fascines to bridge the moat; and she herself gave 
the same order in a loud voice." 

And lo! the thing was done, to the great amaze- 
ment of honest d'Aulon, who briefly adds, "And 
the town was stormed with no great resistance." 

It reads like a miracle, but it was actually accom- 
plished by human pluck and determination, though 
this was without a doubt sustained by that deep 
inner sense of fulfilling the Divine will which was the 
true secret of all Jeanne's success. 

But before La Charite the cloud descended again 

ii8 



Inaction and Failure 

upon the Maid. At her trial she imphed that she 
had no divine encouragement, no "commandment 
from God" anent this town. She had, moreover, 
inadequate forces, neither money nor food for them, 
and her own private wish was to leave La Charite 
alone and concentrate her strength on the towns of 
the He de France, so as ultimately to secure Paris. 
No doubt she did her best, but her heart was not in 
the work, her soldiers grew impatient, and, after a 
month's siege, she was forced to withdraw from 
before the impregnable walls of La Charit6. 

Such a thing might well have happened to any 
general, seeing the difficulties by which she was beset 
— the bitter weather, the lack of food and ammuni- 
tion, the discontented troops. But the crowd of 
ill-conditioned people by which the King was ever 
surrounded seized the opportunity of defaming the 
Maid, though the worst thing they could find to say 
of her was that she had promised her soldiers a 
victory which had never come about! 

In order to discredit her Voices and divine intima- 
tions, her enemies at the Court had brought into 
prominence a certain Catherine, a rival who claimed 
to see actual visions, to which Jeanne, since her 
childhood, had made no pretence. This person told 
Jeanne she could find hidden treasure, and that "a 
lady in white" had commanded her to raise money 
from all the "good towns of France." To the ears 
of covetous courtiers such a suggestion was pleasant 
indeed, and Catherine was made much of, rather, 
perhaps, in order to make her outshine the Maid's 
reputation than for any real credit placed in her 
powers. But Jeanne quickly took her measure, 

119 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

"When does your White Lady appear to you?" 
she asked, looking at her with steadfast eyes, and 
learning that she only appeared at night, promised 
to watch for her in the dame's company. The first 
night, overcome with healthy girlish fatigue, Jeanne 
slept soundly, and listened gravely in the morning 
to the reproaches of Catherine, who professed to 
have had a long conversation with the supernatural 
visitor. Then, having slept during the day, she 
kept close watch next night on the uneasy dame, 
who professed her certainty of the approach of the 
lady who never came. 

"Go home and look after your husband and 
children," good-humouredly advised the large- 
hearted girl, who clearly saw through the woman's 
imposture. But Catherine must have her revenge 
on Jeanne. 

She had advised the girl not to go to La Charite 
"because it was much too cold"; and when the 
expedition failed, she made the most of the fulfilment 
of her prediction, and found that her waning popu- 
larity had received an unexpected impetus thereby. 

Baffled, disgusted by the mean ingratitude of the 
followers of her King, the King of whom even now 
she would permit herself no disloyal thought, Jeanne 
passed dark days enough amid that foolish, petty- 
minded Court. And ever when she sought counsel 
from above, the same answer was returned, striking 
cold dismay to her ardent young heart even in her 
moments of deepest resignation to the Divine Will. 

"Jeanne, thou wilt be taken before the feast of 
St John." 

The notion of imprisonment, of grey stone walls 
1 20 



Inaction and Failure 

and darksome dungeons was hideous to a girl who 
loved the free open air, who delighted in the healthy 
active life of the fields and roads; and she prayed 
with desperate energy that this might not be her lot, 
that if death were to come it might come swift and 
sudden in the midst of the exhilaration of battle or 
siege. But the only answer that came was an assur- 
ance that she would not be alone. ''Nous serons 
avec toil" And with this she was fain to be content. 
It was but poor consolation to her in these miser- 
able days of thwarted zeal and forced inaction, while 
Charles was wasting time in making truces with the 
Burgundians, that the King was pleased to grant her 
and her family a formal patent of nobility in recog- 
nition of her services. He was always very ready 
with such marks of esteem, for they actually cost 
him nothing and soothed a conscience that must 
sometimes have occasioned him vague discomfort; 
and no doubt the deed gratified the simple-hearted 
Maid as coming from the hand of the prince whom 
she never ceased to love and admire. 

The patent of nobility runs after this fashion: — - 
"Charles by the grace of God King of France, in 
the perpetual memory of an event, and to glorify 
the high and Divine Wisdom for the many and signal 
favours which it hath pleased Him to confer upon 
us by the famous ministry of our well-beloved Maid 
Jeanne d'Arc of Domremy, and which, by the 
Divine aid and mercy, we hope to see yet multiplied. 
We therefore judge it well to elevate, in a manner 
worthy of our royal Majesty, this Maid and all her 
family, not only in recognition of her services, but 
also to publish the praises of God, so that being thus 

121 



The Story of Jeanne d^Arc 

made illustrious she may leave to her posterity the 
monument of a recompense emanating from our 
royal liberality, to perpetuate to all ages the Divine 
glory, and the fame of so many graces. 

" Therefore be it known that in consideration of the 
services rendered to us and our realm by the Maid 
Jeanne and of those which we hope from her in the 
future we have by our special grace and wisdom 
ennobled the Maid, Jacques d'Arc of Domremy, his 
wife Isabelle, Jacquemin, Jean and Pierre, the 
father, mother and brothers of the Maid and all 
her family and lineage." 

There follows a list of the privileges conferred by 
such nobility, the freedom to hold fiefs, to carry 
arms, and all other prerogatives of nobles. 

Did Jeanne's heart swell with pride under her 
robe of cloth of gold as she heard the great and 
high-sounding words of this decree? Did she 
not rather hear above the sonorous statement the 
persistent murmur of those other words, so simple, 
so significant: 

" Tu seras prise avant la Saint-Jean." 



Mes enfants, je vous 
signifie que Von ina 
vendue et trahie et que 
de brief je serai livree 

d mort. (The prophecy of 
the Maid at Compidgne) 



CHAPTER XIII: The Last 
Fight, May 1430 

DURING the months that elapsed between 
the repulse at La Charite and the end of 
the truce with Burgundy many disquieting 
rumours reached the ears of Jeanne as to the state 
of her beloved country. 

Paris was torn by plots and counterplots; the 
little towns of the He de France were constantly 
changing hands, to their own great misery and dis- 
advantage; the royal city of Rheims was threatened 
by a siege, and appealed directly to the Maid for 
help. 

"You shall not have a siege if I meet the foes,** 
she writes to them with eager consolation, "and if I 
do not, shut your gates; I will soon be with you, 
and I will make the enemy buckle their spurs in 
haste. '* 

Her hopes were still high; and indeed, from 
the English point of view, the army of the young 
Henry VI had much to fear in the forthcoming 
campaign from the result of her former energies. 

Says Burgundy in his letter of advice to the 
English Council, written during that spring, "Owing 

123 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

to the campaign of July and August 1429 the French 
now hold many towns and fortresses on what was 
formerly the English side of the rivers Loire, Yonne, 
Seine, Marne and Oise. In these regions you will 
find no supplies. Paris is beset, and is daily in 
great peril and danger, for it had obtained supplies 
formerly from those towns that are now in the 
enemies' hands. 

"To lose Paris would be to lose the kingdom." 

He goes on to advise that time be not wasted in 
besieging Rheims for the sake of crowning the young 
King; and advises that the attack be concentrated 
on the town of Compiegne, which, from its position 
as the most loyal town of the north, was able to 
hinder supplies from passing in to Paris, and to 
safeguard the royalist towns in the district. 

This was the point of view of her enemies, and 
shows plainly that they realized to the full the 
difficult and dangerous position in which they stood. 
But Jeanne heard only of the misery of the people, 
of smoking villages and pillaged towns, of ruined 
crops and roads beset with desperate vagabonds, 
and chafed wildly at the golden chains that bound 
her to the Court when she was ready and longing to 
drive out the English foe and to capture Paris with 
one bold dash for victory. 

At length she could bear it no longer. The Court 
was at Sully at the end of March when she made up 
her mind that to hope for ofiicial leave was useless, 
and so rode off with a little troop for Melun, a town 
that had been in the hands of the English for ten 
years until it had been given over in the previous 
autumn to the Duke of Burgundy. 

124 



The Last Fight 



Jeanne took this step in no moment of exultation 
or triumphant hope. She had wasted nerve force 
and vitality in the baffling atmosphere of the Court; 
she had knelt at the feet of Charles in vain; and 
she now rode from him for the last time not so much 
without his leave as without his direct prohibition. 
^Laissez-fairer — it was the old old story as far as 
the King was concerned, and Jeanne, knowing her 
time grew short, determined to act as she herself 
thought best. But she could get no direction, no 
encouragement from her Voices as in the former 
days. When, at her approach about Eastertide, the 
town of Melun opened its gates to the King's men, 
she sought in that place another revelation, but it 
was of no exhilarating nature. 

*'As I was on the ramparts of Melun," she told 
her judges, "St Catherine and St Margaret warned 
me that I should be captured before Midsummer 
Day; that so it must needs be; nor must I 
be afraid or astounded, but take all things well, 
for God would help me. 

"So they spoke, almost every day. And I 
prayed that when I was taken I might die in 
that hour without wretchedness of long captivity; 
but the Voices said that so it must be. Often 
I asked the hour, which they told me not; had 
I known the hour, I would not have gone into 
battle." 

Here speaks the true-hearted Maid, scorning to 
pretend she knew no fear of capture or death. Here 
was the highest form of courage, which "braves the 
danger nature shrinks from" when it was her duty 
so to do 

125 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

From Melun she rode to Lagny "because she had 
heard that they of Lagny made good war on the 
people of Paris"; and here occurred two incidents 
which were afterwards used against her in her trial. 

Soon after her arrival she heard that the neighbour- 
ing roads and villages were being ravaged by a horde 
of bandit 'Englishmen" or more likely Picard or 
Burgu'ndian allies. Against these rode Jeanne and 
the Scottish garrison of Lagny, for nothing stirred 
the tender heart of the Maid more than the sufferings 
of the humble folk of the country-side. With some 
difficulty the men were taken or slain, and amongst 
the former was made prisoner a certain Franquet 
d' Arras, who was forthwith given over to Jeanne 
that he might be exchanged for a loyal Frenchman, 
landlord of a Paris inn, who had been imprisoned on 
a charge of treason by the Burgundians. 

When news came that this man had either died 
in prison or been executed, Franquet was handed over 
to the authorities at Lagny, was tried, condemned 
and forthwith put to death. It was all fair enough 
under the circumstances, but the Burgundians raised 
a great outcry at the execution of a mere robber, 
who was, moreover, a prisoner of war. 

They painted lurid and impossible pictures of the 
Maid as Franquet's executioner, and stored up the 
fact to be used against her when she fell, also a 
prisoner of war, into their hands. The other incident, 
which was used equally against her, was of a curiously 
different nature. 

A child of three days old had apparently died 
before he could receive baptism, and, following a 
very usual custom, his parents laid him before an 

126 



The Last Fight 



image of the Blessed Virgin in the church and asked 
all the maids of the town to pray to God that life 
might be restored to the child. Jeanne, always 
pitiful, and never far from church when not on active 
service, hastened to join the little group. "I went 
with the other maids and prayed and at last there 
seemed to be life in the child, who gasped thrice, 
was baptized; then instantly died and was buried 
in holy ground. For three days, as people say, he 
had given no sign of life. He was as black as my 
coat, but when he gasped his colour began to come 
back. " 

Thus to her judges, who asked insinuatingly: 
"Was it said in the town that you had caused the 
resurrection and that it was done at your prayer .f*" 

"I asked no questions on the subject," answered 
Jeanne, with proud disdain.^ 

The taking of life, the restoration of life, both 
were turned and twisted into ropes to strengthen the 
net already wide spread about the hapless Maid. 

It was in the first week of May that the recreant 
Charles discovered what Jeanne had known and 
acted on all along, and was able to announce openly 
to the people of Rheims that "the Duke of Burgundy 
has never had and now has not any intention of 
coming to terms of peace, but always has favoured 
and does favour our enemies. " 

Thus the time long wasted in pretended and im- 
possible plans for truces came to an abrupt end, and 
open war was declared at last. 

The chief object of the Anglo-Burgundian forces 
at this juncture (May 1430) was to capture Com- 

^ Andrew Lang, The Maid, of France. 
127 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

piegne, the city that commanded the passage of 
the river Oise and the road to Paris. Their troops 
were concentrated some thirty miles to the north- 
west, and proceeded to make good their position on 
the northern side of the river. If Compiegne were 
taken, entrance into the He de France and so into 
Paris would be a matter of comparative ease. 

The Burgundians had already made themselves 
masters of most of the outlying posts on the northern 
side of the river, when Jeanne, hearing that the 
Duke of Burgundy and the Earl of Arundel were 
encamped before the city with a large force, exclaimed, 
"I will go see my good friends at Compiegne," and 
forthwith, in her accustomed way, started off head- 
long and rode rapidly by forest paths into the town. 
It was not her first visit to the place; she had stayed 
there for a few days on more than one occasion 
during these restless months, and had made 'good 
friends' with the citizens according to her wont. 
There must have been some of these indeed who 
received her now with pitiful eyes and heavy thoughts; 
for fresh in remembrance was a strange little scene 
that appears to have taken place early one Sunday 
morning when the Maid had last stayed in Com- 
piegne. Mass was over, when Jeanne was seen 
by the worshippers in the church standing with 
head bowed and face turned toward one of the 
pillars of the nave. The children, of whom there 
were many present, drew near and looked in awe- 
struck silence on the sad young figure of her who 
was always their friend in joy or grief. A few older 
people joined them: possibly one of them inquired 
gently what ailed the Maid. Suddenly she faced 

128 



The Last Fight 



them, crying' out forlornly, "Dear friends and 
children, I have to tell you that I have been sold 
and betrayed and will soon be given up to death. 
I beg of you to pray for me, for soon I shall not have 
any power to serve the King and his kingdom. " 

Many years after Jeanne's death the story was 
told by two old men who at that time must have 
been young lads somewhat older than herself, and 
who had evidently been deeply impressed by her sad 
prophetic little speech. Had she any reason to fear 
and distrust those who should have stood her friends 
at that time.f^ Or was it, we wonder, merely an echo 
of that grim warning sentence: 

" Jeanne, tu seras prise avant la Saint-Jean." 

It was just a month before that fatal date that 
Jeanne rode gaily into Compiegne one bright May 
morning, laid her plans before Flavy, the Governor, 
heard Mass and visited the churches as usual, and 
then occupied herself in preparing the forces for a 
sortie upon the enemy. 

Her plan was to make a sudden attack upon the 
village of Margny, held by the advanced guard of the 
Burgundian army under Baudot de Noyelles. This 
lay between Clairoix, held in force by Jean de Luxem- 
bourg, and Venette, where the English army lay, 
under Montgomery. If it could be taken, therefore, 
the forces of the enemy would be separated and a 
strong position achieved from M^hich to attack the 
army of Burgundy, which lay about three miles 
beyond it. 

The attack on Margny, at a time when most of 
the soldiers had laid aside their armour and were 

129 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

cooking their evening meal, promised well enough, 
seeing that the retreat of Jeanne and her men was 
covered by the bowmen who stood upon the ramparts 
of Compiegne. Quite easily the Maid reached the 
village and scattered the men at the outposts, but 
she was unaware that her movements were being 
watched by a little party of riders led by Jean de 
Luxembourg coming from Clairoix to visit Baudot. 

In hot haste a message was sent for reinforce- 
ments, which rode up at the gallop and would 
have intercepted her then and there had not she 
gallantly forced them back twice along the causeway 
where she had drawn up her little band above the 
flat meadows that surrounded Margny. But by 
this time a party from Venette had come to the help 
of the Burgundians, and had driven her with her 
little body-guard down into the marshy fields. Still 
she returned, gallant as ever, to the attack, but her 
main body of soldiers, separated from their leader 
and terrified by the fast swelling numbers of the 
English, turned and fled helter-skelter back to Com- 
piegne, with the enemy so close upon them that the 
archers on the ramparts dared not shoot lest they 
should slay friend and foe alike. 

At first the Maid knew nothing of this, for the 
English horsemen of Venette had cut her little party 
off from her own troop; then at length, in despera- 
tion, d'Aulon and her brothers seized her bridle and 
forced her to retreat at the rear of the flying soldiers. 
Still she made a gallant struggle, charging back on 
the pursuers, shouting encouragement to her men; 
but the Burgundians were now in close pursuit, while 
the English spears could be seen gleaming in the dim 

130 




'ON THE liOAD TO MAUGNY"— Pa£^e 130 



The Last Fight 



twilight between Jeanne's little party and the crowd 
of fugitives which pressed upon the gates of Com- 
piegne. Then, panic-stricken at the sight, de Flavy, 
fully expecting that in the confusion the foe would 
enter the city and make it their own, ordered the 
drawbridge to be raised and the gates to be closed, 
so that when Jeanne and her little company reached 
Compi^gne it was to find their way blocked by a 
confused crowd of fugitives and foemen, all pressing 
hard upon the closed gates. 

Her one chance now was to turn aside into the 
fields that surrounded the town and try for another 
entrance; but it was too late. The bright scarlet 
gold-embroidered cloak she wore attracted the 
attention of the foemen, eager for such a prize. 
Her few companions closed round her, fighting 
desperately, but to no avail. Surrounded by wild, 
dark faces, with open mouths yelling her own war- 
cry of *Renty!' {rendez-vous) she was dragged 
from her horse by a fold of her bright mantle, 
and brought to the ground in a melee of struggling 
horses and men and blinding dust. 

"When asked to surrender," reports an eye- 
witness, *'she said, 'I have sworn and given my faith 
to another than you, and I will keep my oath!' " 

Some say that de Flavy was guilty of treachery 
toward the Maid, and that it was of him she spoke 
when she talked of being "betrayed and sold." 
But it seems clear that the man could not well have 
acted otherwise. Jeanne would have been the first 
to assure him that his duty was to save the town at 
any cost, and to do this he was bound to sacrifice 
her safety. 

131 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

So the Maid became, as has been well said, "a 
willing sacrifice for the people she had led. " Most 
of them escaped; d'Aulon and her brothers and one 
other were carried off prisoners with her; and into 
the mingled glare and darkness of the Burgundian 
camp at Clairoix, ringing with shouts of triumphant 
delight, the weary young figure of the Maid of France 
disappears. 

The exultation of the Duke of Burgundy over 
this capture, as shown in the letter written by him 
that night after a hurried visit to the camp to prove 
the truth of the report, was almost hysterical. 

"By the pleasure of our Blessed Creator, the thing 
has so happened, and such favour has been done us 
that she who is called the Maid has been taken, and 
with her many captains, knights and squires. (This 
was a gross exaggeration of the facts.) Of this 
capture we are sure there will be everywhere great 
news and the error and foolish belief of those who 
were favourably inclined to her will be made known. 
We write you these tidings hoping you will have 
great comfort, joy, and consolation in them, and 
that you will give thanks and praise to our Creator 
who sees and knows all, and who by His blessed 
pleasure deigns to guide most of our enterprises to 
the good of our lord the King, and the relief of his 
loyal and good subjects. " 

Then the darkness of the night comes down on 
the weeping people of Compiegne, bewildered and 
distraught by the loss of her who had been their 
guiding star, and upon the exultant camp at Clairoix, 
where Jeanne was vainly trying to catch a whisper 
of her Voices to console her through the hours of 
that bitter night watch. 

132 



CHAPTER XIV: The Maid 
in Captivity, May 1430— 
January 143 1 

WHEN Jeanne d'Arc disappeared into the 
darkness of the Burgundian camp, it 
might well have been said by a poet of 
the day that the sun of France had set behind storm 
clouds of woe and distress for that unhappy land. 
Perhaps the strangest thing of all about the matter 
is the very few people who seemed to care that such 
an event had actually happened. The English, it 
is true, made the most of it. Bonfires were lit in 
Paris, and a solemn Te Deum of gratitude was sung 
in Notre Dame. 

And such loyalist towns as Orleans, Tours and 
Blois remembered the bright-faced Maid with regret 
and affection, for we hear that the inhabitants 
offered public prayers for her release, and in one of 
them, at any rate, the people to a man turned out 
into the rough cobbled streets, walking barefoot 
and singing the Miserere in penance for the sins 
that had brought this woe upon the land. 

But what was the King about, or La Tr^mouille, 
or the forces inside Compifegne which she had led 
to the relief of that city.f^ Did they attempt her 
rescue ^ Did they at least begin to open negotiations 
for her ransom as a prisoner of war ? Nothing of the 
kind. 

The men of Compiegne who bore the news to 
Charles and entreated further help to save the 
city were assured by the royal dawdler that he 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

would speedily come to their aid; a promise that, it 
is needless to say, was never kept. Of the capture 
of the Maid he said nothing at all, being perhaps 
inwardly relieved that the strenuous enthusiastic 
spirit which had so often silently reproached him was 
likely to be quelled for the future. 

Most sinister of all, alas! is the letter written to 
the men of Rheims by their archbishop, in which 
he throws the blame of her capture entirely on the 
Maid. "She would not take advice but did as she 
chose." Then he goes on to say that the Court is 
now absorbed in a new prophet, a shepherd boy, 
*'who says that he is commanded by God to defeat 
the English; and that this boy has declared that 
Jeanne has been suffered to be taken because of 
her pride and her rich raiment, and because she 
had acted after her own will and not followed the 
commands laid upon her by God. '* 

So this young impostor, soon to show of what 
shoddy stuff he was made and to expiate his folly 
by a violent death at the hands of the English, 
was readily received in the place of the Maid by 
the volatile Court, and Jeanne was almost entirely 
forgotten. 

One archbishop, he of Embrum, alone stood forth 
in her defence. "For the recovery of this girl," he 
writes boldly to the King, "and for the ransom of 
her life, I bid you spare neither means nor money, 
howsoever great the price, unless you would incur the 
indelible shame of most disgraceful ingratitude!" 

But Charles cared nothing at all for the fate of 
the Maid who had given him the whole devotion of 
her loyal heart, and who, in her darkest hour of trial 

134 



The Maid in Captivity 

and approaching death, still held to it that he was 
the "noblest Christian in the world." 

Jeanne had been led into the camp of Jean de 
Luxembourg on the eve of May 23rd. Two days 
later the news was known in Paris, and the very 
next day a courier rode forth from the city to the 
Burgundian bearing a letter written by the Uni- 
versity of Paris, then an ecclesiastical rather than 
an educational body, and in close touch with the 
Inquisition, whose business it was to investigate all 
charges of sorcery or heresy. This letter, written 
without a moment's delay, suggestive indeed, in its 
almost indecent haste, of the temper of a cat who 
has long watched the hole of a mouse and sees its 
victim at length in the grip of a passing grimalkin, 
demanded that "the said Jeanne be brought as 
prisoner before us with all speed and surety, being 
vehemently suspected of various crimes springing 
from heresy, that proceedings may be taken against 
her before and in the name of the Holy Inquisition 
and with the favour and aid of the doctors and 
masters of the University of Paris, and other notable 
counsellors present there. " 

A formidable array indeed to consider the matter 
of one little unlearned maiden who could neither 
read nor write. And the strangest thing of all is 
that she, most devout and pious of the daughters 
of the Catholic Church, should be the object of that 
Church's suspicion and distrust. We can but find 
one explanation. Jeanne was to find no royal road 
to the bliss that awaited her in a future life, and she 
was spared no humiliation in this one; and just as 
of her Divine Master it was said by His own people, 

135 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

"He is a Samaritan and hath a devil," so by her 
own countrymen and those of her own most fervent 
Faith was she to be judged a heretic and a witch. 

The Maid was, of course, far too vahiable a 
prisoner to be handed over in this summary fashion 
to the ecclesiastical authorities. After being kept for 
a few days in the camp at Clairoix, she was sent by 
de Luxembourg to his strong castle of Beaulieu, 
where she was treated as a prisoner of war and 
allowed for a while to retain d' Anion as her squire. 

Here she remained for a fortnight, refusing stead- 
fastly to give her parole, and determined indeed to 
make her escape at the earliest opportunity. She 
had as yet lost none of her fine courage, though 
harassed by depressing reports of the condition of 
her 'good friends' at Compiegne. 

"That poor town of Compiegne that you loved so 
much," said d' Anion to her one day; "by this time 
it will be in the hands of the enemies of France. " 

"Not at all!" flashed forth the Maid; "the places 
which the King of Heaven has put in the hands of 
the gentle King Charles through me will not be 
retaken by his enemies. " 

A few days later, perhaps because the dread of 
this weighed upon her mind, she made her first effort 
to escape, slipping in her girlish slightness between 
two of the laths which were nailed across the door 
of her room, and hoping, it would seem, to lock her 
warders up within the guard-room, and so be free. 
But she was caught by a gaoler in the passage, and 
taken back at once. 

Probably because of this attempt, she was sent to 
tlie Castle of Beaurevoir, forty miles away, where 

136 



The Maid in Captivity 

she remained till the end of September. In some 
ways this might have been the most bearable part 
of her captivity, for she was in the charge of three 
good and gentle ladies, the aunt and wife of Jean de 
Luxembourg, and his step-daughter Jeanne de Bar. 

All good women fell in love with the Maid at first 
sight, and these were no exceptions to the rule. 
Woman-like, they wished to pet her, to dress her in 
soft feminine attire, and looked with horror on her 
rough, travel-stained boy's clothes. But on this 
point Jeanne was firm. "She could not do this 
without leave from God," she said. "It was not 
yet time. " 

The whole question of the dress was made much 
of at her trial, as we shall see. One of her most 
understanding chroniclers says she regarded man's 
attire as the "symbol of her resolute adherence to 
her mission." It is more than likely too that she 
knew it was the best protection she could have 
among rough men-at-arms, some of whom were 
still her gaolers, even in the peaceful shades of 
Beaurevoir. Besides, the idea of escape was always 
present in her mind, and more so than ever here, 
where disquieting rumoiu-s came very frequently 
concerning the siege of Compi^gne. 

A report that, if the city were taken, all those 
over seven years of age were to be massacred seems 
to have made her desperate. She determined to 
make a leap for liberty from the tower where she 
was imprisoned, and this in spite of her Voices who 
bade her "bear these things gladly, since God would 
help them of Compiegne. " With girlish impatience 
she replied, "Since that is so, I too would be with 

137 



The Story of Jeanne d^Arc 

them." Then came a mysterious intimation that she 
would not be deHvered "till she had seen the King 
of England. " " I have no wish to see him, " she cried, 
*'and I would rather die than be in English hands." 

The thing preyed upon her mind. *'I would 
rather die than live after such a massacre of good 
people, and that was one of the reasons for my leap 
from the tower of Beaurevoir." So she told her 
judges, and leap she certainly did, and falling about 
sixty feet was picked up stunned and bleeding, but 
with unbroken bones. 

She came to herself very sad and humble. She 
said she "was comforted by Saint Catherine who 
bade her confess and pray God's pardon for having 
leaped." But what cheered her most was the 
intimation from the same source that Compiegne 
should have succour before Martinmas. 

This actually happened, and Compifegne, remained 
in the King's hands. 

There now comes upon the scene the man who 
was to be the Maid's worst enemy, Cauchon, Bishop 
of Beauvais. From the first, as representative of 
the University of Paris rather than of the Cathohc 
Church in that part of France, Cauchon had set 
himself to track down the Maid to her destruction. 
It was his representations that caused her to be 
removed from her kind guardians at Beaurevoir, and 
that stirred the English to offer blood-money to de 
Luxembourg as the price of "Jehanne la Pucelle, 
said to be a witch, and certainly a military personage, 
leader of the hosts of the Dauphin. " 

The money, six thousand francs, was raised from 
a tax upon the estates of Normandy, and paid over 

17.8 




'JEANNE'S ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE FROM BEAUUEVOIIf 

— Page 13S 



The Maid in Captivity 

by Bedford to Luxembourg, who turned a deaf ear 
to the earnest prayers of his womenkind on Jeanne's 
behalf. 

For a brief space, while these transactions were 
being carried on, the Maid, now imprisoned at 
Crotoy, had great comfort in the spiritual administra- 
tions of a priest, one Nicolas de Guenville, a fellow- 
prisoner and loyalist Frenchman, who, after hearing 
her confession and giving her Holy Communion, de- 
clared her to be a most devout Catholic Christian. 

From Crotoy she was passed over into the hands 
of the English, and, in spite of the outcry of the Paris 
doctors of divinity, taken by them in November to 
Rouen and imprisoned in a strong and ancient 
castle of the days of Philip Augustus. Here she 
was placed "in a dark cell, fettered and in irons." 
No kindly women were now her guardians, but 
rough and brutal English archers, to whom she was 
merely a witch who had brought disgrace upon their 
arms, and who thought it no shame to bully and 
ill-use a helpless young girl. 

The Earl of Warwick was in command of the Cas- 
tle, and the most absurd precautions were taken 
by him to prevent any attempt at escape. Indeed, 
the whole story of this part of her imprisonment 
would lead us to think that it was some wild and 
savage beast they needed to cage and bar and fetter 
rather than a child of eighteen, already weakened 
by six months of captivity. All hope of escape must 
have now faded from her mind, but one can but think 
she still expected a rescue, if not a ransom, from 
those for whom she had fought so well in the days of 
freedom. 

139 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

Only a few leagues away, at Louvain, her old com- 
rade La Hire was stationed, and he was joined 
there by Duuois, her friend and favourite, a few 
months later. But we get no hint of any attempt 
at rescue from there, while from the south, where 
Charles was still dawdling about from castle to 
castle, not the smallest sign of interest, far less of 
pity or distress on her account, is to be seen. It 
was as though France, her 'bel pays,* for which 
she had fought and striven and bled, had utterly 
forgotten her very existence. Who can say that, 
if she ever realized the fact, it was not the bitterest 
drop in that cup of sorrow which she was yet to 
drain to the dregs? 

The story of that five months' captivity in the 
castle of Rouen is even more tragic than its sequel. 

A citizen of Rouen, who managed to gain ad- 
mission to her cell, saw her chained by the feet to a 
heavy log of wood, and was told that, when asleep, 
she was ironed by the legs with two pairs of heavy 
fetters locked to the bed. She still wore her boy's 
clothes, but in place of the courteous d'Aulon, her 
room was shared day and night by three English 
archers, while two more kept guard outside. 

Even the horrors of the actual trial must have 
been a welcome respite from such an existence. For 
Jeanne, we must realize, had always shown herself 
singularly self-respecting and instinctively refined 
in nature; and the rude jests, the coarse laughter, 
nay, the evil advances of these low-class soldiers, 
not to speak of their constant presence, must have 
been nothing less than the extremitv of torture to her 
pure and modest spirit. 

140 



The Maid in Captivity 

But this was not all that the Maid had to suffer 
before the actual trial began. Other visitors than 
the inquisitive citizen of Rouen were to enter her 
dark cell. One of these was no less a person than 
Jean de Luxembourg, her captor, who was brought 
into the place by the Earl of Warwick, together 
with another English lord, apparently only with the 
intention of harassing and worrying the girl. 

De Luxembourg pretended he had come to ransom 
her. *' Jeanne," said he, with mock gravity, *'I will 
have you ransomed if you will promise never to bear 
arms against us any more. " 

But the Maid's spirit was not yet broken. 

*'It is well for you to jest," she flashed back, "but 
I know you have no such power. I know that the 
English will kill me, believing, after I am dead, that 
they will be able to win all the kingdom of France; 
but if they were a hundred thousand more than 
there are, they shall never win the kingdom of 
France. " 

Enraged at these words, the English lord who 
accompanied the Duke drew his dagger and would 
have struck her, had not Warwick intervened, not 
from any instinct of humanity, one fears, but to 
reserve her for a darker fate. 

Another and more dangerous visitor was one who 
came to her as a fellow-countryman from the marches 
of Lorraine, and a prisoner like herself. By an act 
of charity so unusual that Jeanne might well have 
suspected treachery, her guards left the girl alone 
with this man, in order that they might talk freely 
together. He led her on with ease to converse of 
the old days at Domremy, that seemed now so 

141 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

remote, though it was but two years since she had 
left the place, of the oak wood, and the pleasant 
meadows and of her Voices as they had been heard 
by her in those spots. 

His kind face soothed and encouraged the girl, 
especially when he spoke of her approaching trial, 
telling her that no harm could come to her. She 
little knew that he was a spy in the pay of Cauchon, 
in reality a canon of Rouen Cathedral, and that every 
word of her conversation with him had been recorded 
by the Bishop himself and the Earl of Warwick, who, 
with two notaries, had been listening at a peep-hole 
contrived in the wall of her cell. 

One marvels that the very innocence of her remarks 
did not touch their hearts. One of the notaries 
indeed strongly protested against evidence obtained 
in this way and refused to record it. That her 
judges should stoop to such a trick shows the weak- 
ness of their case against the Maid. 



142 




Passez- outre! 

(Jeanne's exclamation 
at the Trial) 

CHAPTER XV: The Public 
Trial. February 143 1 

T Bonsecours there stands a statue of the Maid 
by Barrias, named "Jeanne d'Arc, prison- 
niere. " It shows her wearing armour, which 
is incorrect enough, but one scarcely notes the fact, 
so is the attention centred on the pitiful manacled 
hands, the boyish attitude, and the fine young 
head thrown back from the shoulders as though in 
amazed protest at the way the world is treating her. 
The soft lips droop pathetically, the wide-open eyes 
are full of simple indignation. "What have I done 
unto you that you should do this to me?" she seems 
to be asking, and reminds us yet once again of that 
far-off cry down the ages of the Christian world: 

*'0h my people, what have I done unto thee? 
And wherein have I wearied thee? Answer Me." 

Three months had elapsed since Jeanne had 
passed beyond the dark portals of Rouen Castle, 
months of terror, of hideous companionship far 
worse than loneliness, of deprivation of the sacra- 
ments, of dread for the future. 

At the end of February began that extraordinary 
trial, in which we find the chief ecclesiastics of the 
realm, the University of Paris, as represented by the 
Bishop of Beauvais, the English Council, with the 
child-King, Henry, as its nominal head, all arrayed 
against a young peasant girl, who "conducted her 

143 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

own case," as we say, whose only defence was her 
own free, simple speech. 

Her actual judge was the Bishop of Beauvais, to 
whom she was passed over, after long deliberation, 
by the English, who, however, claimed her as their 
prisoner of war even if she were acquitted by him. 
The document by which this was effected gives the 
offences with which Jeanne was charged, and on 
account of which she was claimed by the Ecclesiasti- 
cal Court. 

"Henry, by the grace of God, King of France and 
England, to all who shall see these present letters, 
greeting: It is sufficiently well known how, some 
time ago, a woman who caused herself to be called 
Jeanne the Maid, forsaking the garments of the 
feminine sex, did, against the Divine Law, clothe 
and arm herself in the fashion of a man; did do and 
commit cruel acts of homicide, and gave the simple 
people to understand that she was sent from God, 
and had a knowledge of His divine secrets; together 
with many other perilous doctrines, very scandalous 
to the Catholic faith. 

"In pursuing these deceits and exercising hostility 
towards us she was taken armed before Compiegne, 
and has since been brought prisoner to us. And 
because she is by many reputed as guilty of divers 
superstitions, false teachings and other treasons 
against the Divine Majesty, we have been earnestly 
required by the reverend father in God, our friend 
and faithful counsellor, the Bishop of Beauvais, and 
also exhorted by our very dear and well-beloved 
daughter, the University of Paris, to surrender her 
to the said reverend father that he may proceed 

144 



The Public Trial 

against her according to the rule and ordinance of 
the divine and canon laws. Therefore is it that we, 
in reverence and honour for the name of God, and 
for the defence and exaltation of the holy Church 
and Catholic faith, do devoutly comply with the 
requisition of the reverend father in God, and the 
exhortation of the doctors of the University of 
Paris." 

For insincerity and humbug this precious docu- 
ment would be hard to beat. Not a man, woman, 
or child in Rouen but knew that the sole reason for 
all this bitter enmity against Jeanne was that she, 
a mere girl, had revived a dying cause, relieved 
besieged towns, beaten the English off the battle- 
field, and put to shame the might of English arms. 
But this must not be said aloud; it would be far 
more dignified to put the matter on high religious 
grounds, and in the name of faith and religion pass 
her over to Holy Church to be tried as a heretic. 
Yet, lest she should escape the net thus cunningly 
woven for her, the document contained a further 
clause that speaks for itself: 

*' Nevertheless, it is our intention, if the said 
Jeanne be not convicted nor attainted of the crimes 
above named, nor of any of them, nor of others 
concerning our holy faith, to have her and take her 
again to ourselves. " 

It is remarkable that the special court for the 
judgment of heresy, the Holy Office, usually known 
as the Inquisition, was exceedingly reluctant to be 
drawn into the matter, and the Grand Inquisitor 
openly pleaded business elsewhere when called upon 
to assist the Bishop of Beauvais. But the latter was 

145 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

fully equal to carrying out what he gleefully called 
a "beautiful trial"; and it would be a hard matter 
for this most innocent of criminals to evade his toils. 

For months his emissaries had been following the 
footsteps of the Maid from her very birth, prying 
here, questioning there, gathering all kinds of gossip 
and idle chatter, not at all averse from bringing 
forward as witnesses miserable creatures who from 
envy and malice were willing to defame the name of 
this most upright of soldier maids. 

A crowd of canons, doctors and masters of the 
University, priests and notaries, were the assistants 
of the Bishop — even a representative of the Holy 
Office was brought forward at the last minute; and 
when all was ready, the priest, Jean Massieu, was 
sent to read to the prisoner in her cell the mandate 
requiring her to appear "on the morrow, at eight 
o'clock in the morning, before the court appointed 
to try her for the heresies and other crimes of which 
she was accused and defamed. " 

Her reply shows something of the old spirit, un- 
dimmed by three long months of fetters and close 
confinement. 

"Let there be present as many reverend men who 
are on the side of the French king as there are on the 
side of the English; and let me have a learned clerk 
to speak for me; then will I obey it," said she. 
And when they refused this, she begged with more 
humility that at least she might be allowed to hear 
Mass before the trial. This was also denied her, 
on the score that she still adhered to "an unbecom- 
ing dress. ' " 

On a cold February morning (Feb. 21st, 1431) the 

146 



The Public Trial 

Maid was brought into the chapel of Rouen Castle, 
where the trial was to be held. Very slim arid 
boyish she looked as she walked up the crowded aisle, 
dressed in a page's black suit, with her hair cut 
short to her neck. 

Knowing nothing of legal procedure, and probably 
quite unaware that the trial was to be for her a 
question of life and death, Jeanne's first glance round 
the court must, nevertheless, have filled her with 
vague foreboding and put her on her guard. For 
when Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, warned her, in 
gentle tones but with an undercurrent of malevolence 
that was not hid from her clear young gaze, to 
*' speak the full truth concerning those things of 
which you are accused respecting the faith," she 
replied with unwonted caution, *'I do not know on 
what subjects you will question me. Perhaps you 
will ask me such things as I shall not be able to 
answer. " 

"You must swear," repeated the Bishop, "to 
speak the truth on all that shall be asked you con- 
cerning the faith." 

"I will swear to tell you the truth of my father 
and mother and of what I have done since I came 
into France; but of the revelations made to me on 
the part of God, I will not tell them, nor of the 
secret I told to my King. I will not speak about 
them if you cut my head off; for I have been warned 
by my 'Counsel.' " 

It was thus she always spoke of her Voices, and at 
the mention of them such a stir was made in the 
court that some of her words were lost. Possibly 
her attitude of defiance went against her, but in 

147 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

face of such obviously hostile judgment, it was 
inevitable that she should try to guard herself by 
whatever reserve was possible. Finally, however, 
she knelt down and took the oath upon a copy of 
the Gospels that she would tell the truth on all 
matters concerning her faith. But again and again 
the spirit of girlish defiance broke out. 

Asked to say her Paternoster to the Bishop, she 
flatly refused, "unless he would hear her confession, 
then she would say it gladly." She evidently was 
very sore at heart that she, a loyal daughter of the 
Church, should be refused the Sacrament of Penance, 
and took this way of showing her resentment. 

Again, before the session ended for that day, 
the Bishop gave a solemn charge that she should not 
try to escape from her prison, on pain of being 
declared convicted of the crime of heresy. 

*'I do not accept that. I will give no parole," 
she flashed back at him. "So that if I do escape 
no one can blame me for having broken faith, for I 
never gave it to anyone. " 

Then came a very natural and piteous little com- 
plaint of her heavy fetters, to which she received the 
severe reply that she had several times tried to 
escape, and for that reason she was chained, that 
she might be kept more securely. 

"It is true that I wished and always shall wish 
to escape," she said. "Tt is lawful for all prisoners 
to do that." 

At that she was conducted back to prison, under 
strict directions that she was neither to see nor 
speak to anyone. 

The proceedings of the next day were held in 

148 



The Public Trial 

the Castle hall, for the chapel was found to be far too 
small for all those who wished to be present. But 
Jeanne, as she passed the door, had asked, "Is not 
the Body of Our Lord in that chapel?" and had 
knelt in prayer, while Massieu, her guardian, looked 
the other way. Even that was made a cause of 
offence, and Massieu was sternly rebuked for allowing 
this pious young daughter of the Church to gain a 
moment of consolation from the worship of her 
Master. 

This day began with a close and detailed examina- 
tion as to the facts of her life at Domremy. The 
questions were purposely confused and intricate 
in order to entrap the Maid; and her answers were 
interrupted, misinterpreted, and disputed, till the 
brain of a well-trained lawyer might well have reeled 
under such an ordeal. It was, moreover, the Lenten 
season, and Jeanne had not tasted food since the 
one meal of the previous day. 

Yet she never seems to have wavered or become 
confused. With perfect straightforwardness she told 
her simple story, only showing impatience when 
obviously silly questions were put to her, such as: 

"How could she see the light in which her visions 
appeared if it was at the side, and not in front.?" 

Or unnecessary and impertinent queries as to 
whether she had made her Holy Communion at other 
feasts besides Easter, or whether she thought it 
right to fight on a Holy Day. 

^'Passez-ouireV^ (pass on to something else) she 
replies to all such questions, with pardonable asperity. 

Her self-possession is as amazing as her clear- 
headedness. As one of her biographers well says, 

149 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

she might have been "a princess, answering frankly, 
or holding her peace as seems good to her, afraid of 
nothing . . . without panic and without presump- 
tion. The trial of Jeanne is indeed almost more 
miraculous than her fighting; a girl of nineteen, 
forsaken of all, without a friend."^ 

On the third day a fresh altercation about her oath 
to answer truly every question she was asked, began. 

The record says, "We required of her that she 
should swear simply and absolutely without adding 
any restriction to her oath. To which she answered, 
*By my faith, you may well ask me such things as 
I will not tell you: and on some things perhaps I 
shall not answer truly, especially on those that touch 
my revelations; for you may constrain me to say 
things I have sworn not to say.' Then to the 
Bishop she said fearlessly, *I tell you, take great 
heed of what you say, you that are my judge. You 
take a great responsibility in thus charging me. I 
should say that it is enough to have sworn twice. ' '* 

They pressed her again on this point, and she replied 
that she was ready to speak truth on "what she 
knew"; and when again they urged her, she exclaims 
with her usual boyish impatience, "Pass on to some- 
thing else!" {Passez-outre!) 

They asked her about her Voices, questions 
minutely detailed, unnecessarily confusing; to which 
she replied clearly enough. But when they pressed 
her as to the revelations given, she would not 
answer, save that she had revelations touching 
the King, which she would not tell, and that she 
was forbidden to speak of these. They asked if 

^ Mrs. Oliphant, Jeanne d' Arc. 
150 



The Public Trial 

she had heard her Voices recently, and she replied 
that they had been with her on the previous night 
and had spoken much to her for the good of the King, 
which she would be glad to let him know. 

They tried to discredit her visions by asking if it 
was by their advice she tried to escape from prison; 
which she took up shortly and sharply with the 
rejoinder: 

"I have nothing to say to you on that point." 

"Did you see anything besides the Voice.?" 
asked the Bishop. To which she answered: 

"I will not tell you all; I have not leave; my 
oath does not touch on that. My Voice is good and 
to be honoured. I am not bound to answer you 
about it. " 

She may well have felt by instinct that the 
strangely intimate nature of her vision would be 
profaned by discussion in the midst of that sneering, 
prejudiced court. 

They next pressed her about her early associations 
with the 'Fairies' Tree,' and the Oak Wood of 
Domr^my, in the hope of showing that she had from 
childhood been associated with magic and sorcery. 
The frank and simple information given in reply 
suggests that Jeanne did not even suspect the pur- 
port of these questions. She certainly made no 
effort to hide or disguise the truth. 

*'What have you to say about a certain tree that 
is near to your village.'*" 

"Not far from Domremy is a tree that they call 
the 'Ladies' Tree,' others call it the 'Fairies' Tree.' 
Near by is a spring to which people sick of the 
fever come to drink. I have seen them come 

151 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

thus myself; but I do not know if they were cured. 
It is a beautiful tree, a beech. I have sometimes 
been there to play with the young girls, and to make 
garlands for Our Lady of Domremy. Often have I 
heard the old folk — not of my family — say that the 
fairies haunt this tree. Whether it is true, I do not 
know; as for me I never saw them. 

"I have seen the young girls putting garlands on 
the branches of this tree, and I myself have some- 
times put them there with my companions; but 
ever since I knew I had to come into France, I have 
given myself up as little as possible to these games 
and distractions. Since I was grown up I do not 
remember to have danced there. I may have done 
so formerly with the other children; I have sung 
there more than danced. " 

Surely the frank admission must have proved even 
to those prejudiced minds that here they had 
to deal with no witch maiden, but with a simple 
village girl, recalling her childish amusements with 
evident efiFort, for they had receded, oh! so far, 
since she had taken up the banner at her Lord's 
command. 

Suddenly, at the end of this long wearisome day, 
they asked her if she wished to have a woman's 
dress. 

For a moment her heart leaped up. Did this 
mean release? "Bring me one to go home in, 
and I will gladly use it," she said; then realizing the 
hopelessness of that idea she quickly added, "No, 
I prefer this, since it pleases God that I should 
wear it. " 

The question of her boy's dress was brought up 

152 



The Public Trial 

again later. They tried to force frora her an ad- 
mission that she wore it at the suggestion of Robert 
de Baudricourt; and when she gave a fiat denial, 
they asked if she herself thought it was well to dress 
in male attire. She replied firmly that she had done 
nothing in the world but by the order of God. 

So the long days followed on another, full of 
weary, pointless interrogations, repetitions, absurd 
and trifling details. The marvel is that the Maid 
bore them so well, and showed such spirit, such 
power of repartee, when she must have been physi- 
cally and mentally wearied in the extreme. 

Thus, when they asked her if her Saints wore rings, 
she replies with contempt, "I know nothing about 
it," and then, turning sharply on the Bishop, she 
adds, "But you have one of my rings; give it back 
to me. " 

It was the old-fashioned circlet ring given by her 
father or mother and engraved with the words, 
Jhesus, Maria. Even this innocent symbol was 
turned against her by her judges. 

It was no wonder that in that great assembly some 
hearts less hardened, less jaundiced than the rest, 
were moved to pity for the gallant Maid in her 
helpless position. One of her judges, Nicolas de 
Houppeville, even protested that it was not lawful 
for Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, to sit as chief 
judge, since he was a Burgundian, and therefore 
incapable of taking an unprejudiced view. For this 
protest he was thrown into prison. 

A lawyer of Rouen, Jean de Lohier, declared that 
the trial was not valid on certain technical grounds, 
and especially because she, a simple girl, was not 

153 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

allowed counsel, "for see how they are going on!" 
he said. "They will catch her in her words, as when 
she says 'I know for certain that I touched the 
Apparition.' If she had said 'so it seemed to me,' 
I think no man could condemn her," 

For this upright declaration, Lohier was presently 
forced to flee from France for his life. 

The reporter, Manchon, also makes a statement 
that shows his indignant pity for the Maid under an 
unjust judge. 

"Monseigneur of Beauvals would have everything 
written as pleased him, and when there was anything 
that displeased him, he forbad the secretaries to 
report it as being of no importance to the trial. " 

Even the evidence of the priest, Massieu, the 
Sheriff's officer and practically her gaoler, is to the 
same effect. He met an English clerk who was one 
of the followers of the Bishop of Winchester, and who 
asked him, "What do you think of her answers .^^ 
Will she be burnt .?* What will happen .f*" 

"Up to this time," says the cautious Massieu, 
*'I have heard nothing from her that was not 
honourable and good. She seems to me a good 
woman, but how it will all end God only knows. " 

Once, indeed, the whole court, in its startled 
silence, seemed to show sympathy with the Maid. 

She had said again and again that, had it not been 
for the grace of God, she would not have known 
how to act, when one of her judges asked, probably 
with a sneer, "How do you know you are in the 
grace of God.f^" 

An Augustinian monk, who formed one of the court, 
interposed pityingly, "That is a great matter to 

154 



The Public Trial 

answer. Perhaps the accused is not bound to answer 
upon it." 

At once the bullying voice of the Bishop silenced 
him. *'You would have done better to be quiet!" 

A heated discussion followed as to the propriety 
of the question, which was at length again put to 
Jeanne. 

"Speak, Jeanne; do you know yourself to be in 
the grace of God.'^" 

Most pathetically rang out the piteous voice of 
the Maid: 

"If I am not, God bring me to it! If I am, God 
keep me in it! I should be of all women most 
miserable if I knew myself to be out of the love and 
favour of God." 

The silence that followed was broken by the words 
of an archdeacon, more courageous than the rest : 

"Jeanne, thou hast answered well!" 

When the trial was resumed after this long 
and embarrassed pause, the questioner dealt with 
quite other matters. 



155 




Aie hon courage, prends 
ton martyre en gre; tu 
seras hientot delivree, et 
tu viendras finalement au 
royaumedu Paradis (Les Voix 

in the prison.) 

CHAPTERXVI: The Exam- 
ination in the Prison. March- 
May 143 1 

^OR six days the public examination had 
dragged along its weary course. At the end 
of that time several significant changes had 
occurred in the procedure of the trial. Of the sixty- 
eight judges who presided on the second day, twenty- 
four had managed on some excuse or other to slip 
away altogether, as though ashamed of the part they 
had come to play. 

In Rouen itself a change was clearly coming over 
public opinion. The lawyer Lohier, whom we have 
already seen objecting to the legality of the trial, 
had now openly declared that he would have nothing 
more to do with it. The priest, Massieu, who, as 
warder of the Maid, had had occasion to watch her 
most closely, was heard again to declare his belief 
in her innocence. 

Moreover, from the crowd who stood by as listeners 
to the evidence, there had more than once risen a 
cry of "Well said!" and even an English knight, 
belonging to the most prejudiced party of all, had 
called out on one occasion, after a more than usually 

156 



The Examination in the Prison 

spirited reply, "Why was this brave Maid not an 
Englishwoman ? " 

It really seemed as though public opinion, which 
had formerly clamoured for Jeanne to be burnt as 
a witch, was now veering round to her side so 
completely as to make her condemnation a matter 
of difficulty if not of impossibility. 

This, to the minds of the Burgundian Bishop and 
his English friends, was an intolerable position; 
and forthwith, after much consultation, the public 
examination was closed. 

A week later, a small committee was appointed 
to examine her, three or four of them at a time, in 
prison. 

Here conditions were very much harder for the 
Maid. She no longer had a breath of fresh air, a 
glance at the spring sunshine as she crossed the 
courtyard. No crowd of spectators sustained her 
with an ever-increasing sympathy. If one of her 
judges seemed to be favourably inclined to her, it 
was not difficult to exclude him for the future. 

It is no wonder then that for the first time we 
find the splendid nerves of the Maid beginning to 
show signs of strain. The first symptom of this was 
curious enough. Her interlocutors took the op- 
portunity to press her very hard again upon the 
subject of the sign she had given to the King on her 
first appearance at Chinon. 

She had already refused several times to discuss 
this, saying indeed that "she would rather have her 
head cut off than reveal the divine communication 
to her sovereign. '* 

Now, however, when hard pressed, she suddenly 

157 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

let loose a flood of information, vague, mystifying, 
unsatisfactory to a degree. Those who have most 
closely studied her character and history explain 
the matter thus. She had been badgered beyond 
endurance by those who insisted that there was 
a sign — a matter about which she had refused to 
give any information whatever. Weary, bored, and 
possibly inspired by an impulse almost of girlish 
mischief, a wish to mislead and mystify these learned 
men, a wish also to end the matter by inventing 
something, anything, to satisfy them, she composed 
a long tale of wonder, which, while really telling 
them nothing definite, was full of mysterious 
details. If it did not satisfy them, let them try 
some other line. Passez-outre! 

Or it may have been indeed the feverish excite- 
ment of an over-strained mind that thus drew 
Jeanne away from her usually calm and accurate 
rejoinders. 

In what followed we lose also the note of hopeful- 
ness that had been so marked at the beginning 
of the trial. 

They asked her if her Voices had spoken to her of 
late in her cell; and she answered gravely: 

"Yes; they say to me, 'Have good courage; take 
thy martyrdom cheerfully; thou shalt soon be 
delivered and thou shalt come at last to the kingdom 
of Paradise. 

She added, sadly, that she knew not whether she 
had still more to suffer, but she waited for the will 
of her Lord. 

Her judges then began a long and tedious examina- 
tion, directed to prove that she refused to submit to 

158 



The Examination in the Prison 

the Church on the question regarding the nature of 
her Voices. This was the most trying part of all to 
Jeanne, whose faith was that of a simple child, who 
could be caught tripping over and over again by 
hostile clerics, learned in theology; and who knew, 
moreover, that the Church, in this sense, signified 
the English and Burgundian ecclesiastics. 

At first, when the words "Submission to the 
Church" were mentioned, she brightened up and 
said boldly that "she ought to be allowed to go to 
church. " 

They asked her if she did not think it unbecoming 
for her to hear Mass in a boy's dress, to which she 
replied that she would wear a woman's dress on that 
occasion, if they would promise to let her go to 
church. 

Half teasing, they promised it, insisting on the 
change of attire, however, with such force and mean- 
ing that Jeanne drew back. She would not give up 
her tight-fitting boy's dress altogether. 

"Let me have a long skirt without a train and 
go to Mass. On returning I will wear my boy's 
suit. " 

They refused, upon which she declared she would 
not give up her present garb at all; and the matter 
dropped for the time. 

The whole question of the dress was dwelt on and 
much exaggerated by her judges. The real explana- 
tion of the fact seems to be that Jeanne clung to her 
boy's dress for two reasons. 

It had been indispensable during her rough life 
in the camp, and even more so during those first 
months in prison, when she was exposed to the rude 

159 



The Story of Jeanne d^Arc 

horse-play and unseemly jokes of the English archers. 
It had, moreover, as we have already noted, become 
to her the outward symbol of her Call and her Work; 
at the desire of the King alone had she reluctantly 
laid it by for a time, and she implied in one of her 
answers that only at his command would she relin- 
quish it now. The dress they had tried to force upon 
her in prison was the short frock of a peasant girl. 
Humble as she was, she had no mind to degrade 
her high calling by unseemly attire. She had worn 
the robe of a noble lady at the Court, and she now 
demanded at least the long dress of a citizen's 
daughter in which to go to church. As this was 
denied her, she would keep to her boy's garb. 

But a few days later the shadow had darkened in 
that gloomy cell, and for the first time she had a 
premonition of the end. They had urged her again 
to say if she would submit to the judgment of the 
Church; and she had answered, with troubled 
looks, " I submit myself to Our Lord and Our Lady 
and all the Blessed Saints in Paradise; Our Lord 
and the Church are one. Why do you make a 
difficulty as if it were not?" 

They explained that they referred to the Church 
Militant on Earth; and she said emphatically, "I 
came to the King of France on the part of God and 
the Church Triumphant above, and to that Church 
I submit all my good deeds and all that I have done 
or shall do. " 

Poor little Maid! She was no heretic, though 
they twisted her simple speech into something 
resembling heresy; but she knew that for her at 
that moment, the Church below meant the Bishop 

1 60 



The Examination in the Prison 

of Beauvais and his implacable friends, and to their 
judgment she would not submit her Divine Voices, 
her call from above. She knew, moreover, as she 
watched their grim faces kindle with satisfaction at 
her refusal, that the net was being drawn closer 
and closer round her girlish limbs; and when they 
harped again on the subject of her dress, it was with 
anxious eyes and troubled face that she, foreseeing 
shame and possible dishonour, said with trembling 
earnestness : 

*'I will not put on this woman's dress yet — not 
until it shall please God. But if I am brought to 
death, and I must be unclothed to die, I beg of you, 
my lords of the Church, that you will have the charity 
to allow me a woman's long shift, and a kerchief 
for my head." Then she steadies her faltering 
voice and adds firmly, "For I would rather die than 
revoke what God has caused me to do; but I believe 
firmly that He will never let me be brought so low, 
and that I shall have His help, and by a miracle. " 

"Why do you ask for a woman's shift if you wear 
man's dress by command of God.^*" they asked 
curiously; but she only repeated her pitiful little 
request. 

"7/ is enough that it should he long." 

Surely even those hard hearts must have been 
touched with pity for the helpless girl, with the fire 
and the stake in view, whose chief dread is of the 
rude gaze of the soldiery upon her shrinking form, 
stripped of the garb that had been her protection 
until now. 

In the afternoon of that day, she made her pathetic 
appeal to be judged by the Pope himself. Half 

i6i 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

Jeering, they had asked her if she would feel bound 
to speak more fully before the Holy Father than 
she had done before 'my lord of Beauvais. ' 

She leaped at the suggestion. *'I demand to be 
taken before him! Before him I will answer all 
that I ought to." 

This alone was enough to prove her loyalty to the 
Church, but she was not thus to escape the toils that 
had been spread so carefully for her. They hastily 
turned to another subject and asked if it were true 
that her standard had been carried into the cathedral 
at Rheims when those of the other captains had 
remained outside. Her answer rings out with the 
brave spirit of old: 

*'It had been through the labour and the pain! 
Reason good that it should have the honour!" 

On March 17th, the eve of Passion Sunday, the 
long examination came to an end. For the next 
few days a group of learned doctors busied them- 
selves in drawing up twelve articles containing the 
chief points of indictment against the Maid, and then 
in considering them one by one. They came to the 
conclusion that "the Visions and Voices were either 
'human inventions' or the work of devils; that 
Jeanne's evidence was a tissue of lies; that she was 
blasphemous towards God and impious towards her 
parents; schismatic as regarded the Church, and so 
forth. "^ And meantime this poor httle 'heretic' was 
pleading that she might be allowed to hear Mass on 
Palm Sunday, and be allowed to approach the sacra- 
ments of Confession and Holy Communion at Easter. 

The Bishop and four others had come to her cell 

1 Andrew Lang, The Maid of France. 
162 



The Examination in the Prison 

very early that Palm Sunday morning, and they 
insisted that she must wear the peasant's dress if 
she were allowed this; but by this time, to the 
Maid's overstrained and weary mind, the boy's 
garb had become an absolutely sacred symbol of 
her loyalty to God and His Saints; to give this up 
was to relinquish her case and to disobey her Master. 

"My Voices do not advise me to do it; I cannot 
do it yet," she said. 

They began to entreat her with apparent kindness 
and good- will, to reconsider her decision. 

"If it depended on me, it would soon be done," 
she replied sadly. 

"Will you consult your Voices as to whether you 
may change it, so as to have your Easter Com- 
munion.?" urged the Bishop. 

"I cannot change it — not even to receive my 
Saviour!" she said. "Let me hear Mass to-day as 
I am. My dress is no burden on my soul — to wear it 
is not against the Church." 

But they thought otherwise. By this time even 
to them the whole question of the garments worn 
by Jeanne had assumed abnormal proportions. To 
relinquish her boy's dress was to 'submit to the 
Church,' and her refusal was but another addition, 
in their eyes, to her list of crimes. 



163 



Je me soumettra 

The words of Jeanne at 
her (Abjuration) 

CHAPTER XVII: The 'Ab- 
juration ' of Jeanne. May 1 43 1 

THE consideration of the Twelve Articles 
by which the Maid had offended gave 
Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, more trouble 
than he had expected. The old Archbishop of 
Avranches, for example, a man learned in theology, 
declared that, according to the doctrines of St 
Thomas of Aquin, the greatest authority in the 
Church, Jeanne had said nothing amiss. Others 
were by no means emphatic in giving their opinion 
against her, but expressed their willingness to 
abide by the decision of the University of Paris. 
This decision was couched in unmistalcable terms. 
"Jeanne had been delivered over to Satan" and 
must be condemned as a heretic. 

Meantime the Maid had fallen ill. The marvel is 
that she had retained her health so long, seeing that 
for months she had lain fettered in a dark, unwhole- 
some cell, fTom which she had only emerged for a 
week to be questioned and harassed before the Court. 
Her most sympathetic historian^ says that her heart 
began to fail her on that Palm Sunday when they 
would not let her go to church as she had begged. 

The heau jour de Paqnes fleuries would be 
especially dear to the country girl, who had lived 
among the trees green with spring buds, who loved 

1 Michelet. 
164 



The Abjuration of Jeanne 

the fresli air, and who had doubtless in bygone days 
often helped to gather the sprigs of flowering willow, 
which were blessed and distributed to the faithful on 
that day. But now it was passed by her in that 
gloomy cell, au fond de la tour, where she lay watch- 
ing the fast-closed door with longing, pitiful gaze. 

No wonder she broke down in health, and that 
when she was brought forth on the Tuesday in Holy 
Week to the great hall of the castle, she was found 
languid, feverish, dispirited, yet holding quite firmly 
to her convictions. 

Her judges talked to her gently and kindly. They 
did not want to be revenged on her, not even to 
punish her, but merely to put her in the way of 
truth and safety. They would instruct her and 
admonish her for her good. 

The Maid's eyes were keen enough in spite of 
languor and sickness. She glanced from one face 
to the other; she noted the hostile looks, the uneasy 
smile, the pretence of friendliness; and she replied 
quite gently but very steadily. *'In that you 
admonish me for my good, I thank you; as to the 
advice you offer me, I have no intention of departing 
from the counsel of my Lord." 

As usual they returned to the charge of her wearing 
man's dress, and insisted that she should give this 
up. She answered wearily that "it was not for her 
to say when she would do that." 

They reminded her again that Easter was near, 
and that she would not be allowed to hear Mass in 
her present attire. With a flash of the old spirit 
she replied, *'0h, well, Our Lord can quite well 
cause me to hear it without you." 

165 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

After two days of this examination, the Maid lay 
in her gloomy cell, silent save for the rough rude talk 
of the men-at-arms, till Easter Eve. During that 
time several of her judges managed to slip away; 
they were not anxious to see the miserable business 
to its close; but on the Saturday, when those who 
remained visited the cell they found the girl had 
regained something of her former cheerfulness. 

'' Associant les souff ranees a celles du Christ, elle 
s'etait relevee,^' says Michelet; and we can well see 
how that long Good Friday spent in quiet meditation 
may have brought new strength and steadfastness 
to the girl who Was following so closely in her 
Master's steps. 

When they once more asked her if she would 
submit to the Church, she replied with quiet dignity, 
"Yes, if it does not command me to do anything 
impossible to me." In that case she said again and 
again she would submit to no man but only to her 
Lord. 

Easter came, and with it a present of a carp to 
the young prisoner from Monseigneur de Beauvais, 
after eating which Jeanne became so alarmingly ill 
that the general opinion of the day was that it had 
been poisoned. This is quite unlikely, for her death 
in prison would have frustrated all his intentions, 
and, as a matter of fact, doctors were sent to her 
cell, and every effort made to recover her. Yet still 
we see her chained to that bed of sickness, and 
left to the haphazard nursing of the soldiers who 
guarded her, though she was so ill that she herself 
thought she would die. 

*'I think I am in great danger of death," she said 

i66 



The Abjuration of Jeanne 

pitifully to her judges when they visited her, "and 
I implore you that I may confess myself and receive 
Holy Communion and be buried in holy ground." 

*'If you would have the Sacraments you must 
submit to Holy Church." 

*'I cannot say anything more about that," she 
said wearily. 

For a fortnight they left her alone. Then finding 
her slightly better in health, they determined to 
try and frighten her into submission. On May 9th 
they brought her into a grim chamber where lay the 
instruments of torture, racks and screws, and showed 
her the executioners ready for their terrible task. 

She may have blanched at the sight, but indigna- 
tion roused her to a spirited reply. 

*' Truly if you tore me limb from limb, till my soul 
is forced from my body, I will say no other thing 
than I have said. And if I do, I will always declare 
that you dragged it from me by force." 

So the judge "seeing the manner of her replies, 
and her obdurate mind, and fearing that the agony 
of torture would not do her any good, postponed it 
till they had further counsel." 

A week later came the reply of the Council of the 
University of Paris, already referred to, which con- 
demned her as an 'obstinate heretic' 

For one terrible week of uncertainty they left 
the Maid alone in her cell, while they debated upon 
what should next be done to her. The declaration 
of the University had ended thus: 

"If the aforesaid woman, charitably exhorted 
by competent judges, does not return spontaneously 
to the Catholic faith, publicly abjure her errors, 

167 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

and give full satisfaction to her judges, she is hereby- 
given up to the secular judge to receive the reward 
of her deeds." 

By this time her unwilling judges had been brought 
back again to their post. They knew that the 
sentence just read implied the terrible death at the 
stake^ yet some there were who would hasten on 
to that end without further delay. Others, more 
merciful, recommended that Jeanne should once 
more be 'charitably exhorted,' and accordingly 
she was again brought into the Hall and made to 
listen to the Twelve Articles of Accusation. 

She heard in silence, and when asked what she 
had to say for herself, silence was still her answer. 
She might well have been overwhelmed by the 
terrible indictment into which learned divines had 
twisted her simple answers, her sincere words. She 
guessed, too, what was the end in sight, as is seen 
in the words which at length fell with pitiful 
expression from her trembling lips. 

"If I were at judgment; if I saw the fire kindled 
and the faggots ablaze, and the executioner ready 
to stir the fire; and if I were in the fire, I would 
say no more, and till death I will maintain what I 
have said is the truth." 

Res'ponsio Johannce superha — the "proud reply 
of Jeanne" — is the comment made in the margin of 
his manuscript by the scribe who took down her 
words, and he adds: 

"And immediately the promoter and she refusing 
to say more, the cause was concluded." 

One more attempt to shake her resolution was 
made, and the scene in which it occurs is the darkest 

i68 



The Abjuration of Jeanne 

of Jeanne's young life. To understand its grim 
purport we must remember, first, that it was not at 
all to the mind of Cauchon that his victim should 
go to the stake still firm in her innocence, unmoved 
in her declaration that her Voices were of God. It 
has been well said by one of her biographers that 
*'the popular mind has a tendency to embrace 
beliefs maintained to the death; and if Jeanne could 
so maintain the verity of her revelations, some of 
which none could deny had been gloriously fulfilled, 
dead, she would have a following such as in her 
day of honour she had never numbered."^ Hence 
it was necessary that by hook or by crook she 
should be frightened into some sort of submission 
and abjuration. 

But, on the other hand, the English party, under 
the nominal direction of the Bishop of Winchester 
and the Earl of Warwick, were equally determined 
that no such abjuration should save Jeanne's life. 
By the law of the Church, such a submission would 
admit the prisoner to 'penitence,' generally life- 
long, within the ecclesiastical prisons. The English 
would not run the risk of any such thing. A popular 
rising in favour of the Maid, a turn in the popular 
opinion even, would set her free, and all the trouble 
would begin over again. 

So, by some means or another, Jeanne must 
abjure and yet must be burnt as a heretic; and 
these two facts must be borne in mind in surveying 
the few remaining scenes of her life. 

Jeanne had had a restless, dispiriting night after 
the French trial had ended, and the soft May sun- 

^ Parr, Ijije and, Death of Jeanne d^ Arc. 
169 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

shine, as it filtered in through the bars of her dungeon 
window, found her weary, nervous, ill at ease. Her 
Voices had ceased of late — that was her chief source 
of trouble, though they had for some time past been 
so vague as to be almost useless to her. Their 
promise, made long weeks ago, that within three 
months there would be aid for her, and a great 
victory, seemed quite unfulfilled. The end of May 
was fast approaching, and with it the period of 
three months would be over. For perhaps the first 
time she knew the bitter misery of doubt. Had she, 
after all, been mistaken .^^ Had all her courage, her 
constancy, been in vain? 

To her, in those early morning hours, came one 
of her more kindly judges, Jean Beaupere, who told 
her that on this very day she would be taken to the 
scaffold to be preached to before the people. *'Now, 
if you are a good Christian, you will say there, on 
the scaffold, that all your words and deeds you will 
submit to the ordinances of holy Mother Church, 
and especially of your ecclesiastical judges." 

Whether she made any reply is not clear, but 
presently, as though in a dream, she found herself 
being drawn in a car through shouting throngs of 
people who pressed upon her, some with savage 
threats, many with looks of pity, as she glanced about 
her with eyes dazed by the bright spring sunshine. 
It was three months since she had breathed the fresh 
air of the outside world, three months of almost 
incessant harass. Her young limbs, stiff with 
the pressure of heavy fetters, stretched themselves 
gladly, her young heart was fired with hope. What 
girl of nineteen, deserted by her friends, alternately 

170 



The Abjuration of Jeanne 

coaxed and bullied by learned men, men who repre- 
sented the Church she had always loved, could have 
stood out longer against their urgent representations ? 

A cold shadow fell upon her soul as she saw with 
a shudder, in the midst of the market-place, a high 
scaffold with a stake upon it and faggots ready for 
the burning. Only the victim was wanting, and 
there were those in that crowd who did not hesitate 
to draw her attention to the grim spectacle with 
mocking cries as the car in which she sat rattled 
past over the cobble stones of the square. 

In the great churchyard of St Ouen two platforms 
had been erected, on one of which sat Cardinal 
Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, Cauchon, Bishop of 
Beauvais, and about forty other judges. On the 
other platform stood a pulpit for the preacher, and 
a place for Jeanne, who stood there in her worn, dark 
suit, with Massieu close beside her. The sermon was 
preached by Guillaume Erard, unwillingly enough, it 
was true, though it is a fact that, as he warmed to 
his task, he used terms of reproach and shame that 
were more than unnecessary. To these Jeanne 
listened in silence. Perhaps she scarcely heard him; 
perhaps her thoughts were busy with the distant 
line of country she could see beyond the walls, 
or with that dark scaffold in the market-place. 
Suddenly, however, her attention was arrested. 
The preacher had raised his voice, was pointing to 
her, and in loud tones was crying out: "It is to 
thee, Jeanne, I speak, and I tell thee thy King is a 
heretic and a schismatic!" 

The words instantly roused all the loyalty of the 
Maid, and her voice rang out distinct and clear: 

171 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

"Say of me what you like, but let the King be! 
By my faith I swear upon my life that my King is 
the most noble Christian of all Christians, that he 
is not what you say." 

"Make her hold her peace," cried Cauchon and 
the outraged preacher in one breath; and so the 
'sermon' proceeded to the bitter end. When he 
had finished, the Maid 's voice once more rang out, 
though now more subdued in tone. 

"I will answer you. I have told them that all 
the works that I have done or said may be sent to 
Rome, to the Holy Father, to whom, but to God 
first, I refer in all." 

"That is not enough. The Pope is too far off, 
and every bishop is judge in his own diocese," she 
was told. 

Again and again they urged her, and three times 
"definitely admonished her that she should submit 
to Holy Church," and finally the Bishop of Beauvais 
began to read aloud the sentence passed upon her 
as a heretic. 

In the oflScial records we find this one brief, 
pregnant note inserted by Manchon the scribe: 

^'' At the end of the sentence, Jeanne fearing the 
fire, said she would obey the Church.'^ 

What actually happened seems to have been as 
follows. After her declaration that she would sub- 
mit to the Pope and the refusal of her judges to 
accept this, two forms of 'abjuration,' one long 
and formal, the other very brief, were brought 
forward, and the latter was handed to Massieu 
by Erard, who said at the same time to Jeanne, 
"Jeanne, thou wilt abjure and sign that schedule." 

172 



The Abjuration of Jeanne 

"But I do not know what it means to 'abjure,'" 
cried the Maid, bewildered by the loud voices, the 
angry faces, the bullying words. 

Massieu did his best to help her. "To abjure 
means, Jeanne, that if ever you go contrary to any 
of the points written in this document, you will be 
burnt." He added privately, hoping to save her, 
"I advise you therefore to appeal to the Catholic 
Church as to whether you ought to sign it." 

She caught at this, crying out, "I appeal to the 
Catholic Church," but Erard only raged back at 
her, "Thou shalt sign it at once or be bm^nt!" 

"But I cannot write!" she wailed, and cast 
despairing eyes over the crowd below, from which, 
from time to time, cries of pity and encouragement 
ascended. 

"Save yourself, Jeanne, why should you die?" 

"Sign! Sign!" 

Once indeed she flung them back her answer, 
her declaration of innocence. 

"All that I have done, all that I do is well done, 
and I have done well to do it!" 

But there was, perhaps, beneath the brave words 
a note of despairing doubt. 

Still they pressed, urged, bullied her; and at 
length the Bishop of Beauvais began slowly to read 
the sentence of condemnation. Half-way through, 
Erard was busy again at Jeanne 's ear. 

" Thou must abjure ! If thou wilt do what thou art 
counselled to do thou shalt be released from prison." 

She wavered, while a mingled shout of pity and of 
wrath as they saw the chance of their prey escaping 
rose from the crowd below. 

173 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

*'/ will submit.^* 

The piteous cry must have rung out in the 
momentary silence that followed. The Bishop 
stopped immediately, much to the wrath of an 
Englishman, chaplain to the Cardinal, who muttered, 
"Monseigneur favours the woman." 

Cauchon might well reply angrily, "There is no 
favouring in such a case!" He knew the inevitable 
end. 

Meantime Massieu read aloud to Jeanne the 
formula of recantation in which she was made to 
say that "she had lyingly feigned to have had 
revelations and apparitions from God, by the angels, 
and St Margaret and St Catherine: that she had 
worn an immodest dress against nature . . . that 
she had grievously erred in the faith." 

Well might a bystander note that the Maid openly 
smiled as she heard the high-sounding words — 
smiled, possibly, in self-scorn, but also at the ab- 
surdity of such admissions. 

Even then they tricked her, for at once she was 
given to sign a much longer paper of recantation, 
and at that she took alarm, saying, "Let this be seen 
by the Clergy and by the Church in whose hands I 
ought to be put; and if they counsel me to sign it, 
I will obey!" 

But it was too late for this; probably Erard 
threatened her with "Sign, or burn!" upon which 
she hastily "made a cross with the pen which the 
witness handed to her." 

As a matter of fact, though this is the report of 
Massieu, she made a round O at the foot of the 
shorter paper, and it is still a matter of conjecture 

174 



The Abjuration of Jeanne 

how the signature Jehanne, scrawled at the end of 
the longer document, was obtained. 

A scene of confusion followed. The English 
soldiers in the crowd began to throw stones at the 
judges in their wrath at what they considered deliver- 
ance for Jeanne. Scarce could the Bishop's voice 
be heard as he hastily read a sentence releasing 
her from excommunication and ending thus: "But 
since you have sinned against God and the Church 
we condemn you, in our grace and moderation, to 
pass the rest of your days in prison, on the bread 
of sorrow and the water of anguish, there to weep 
and lament your sins, and commit no more for the 
future." 

A pause of uncertainty followed. Had Jeanne 
really hoped for release her heart must have sunk 
at Cauchon's words, but she seems rather to have 
heard the sentence with relief. While the Bishops 
hastily conferred as to what they should do with her 
next, while one of her false friends was pretending 
to congratulate her with oily words, "Jeanne, you 
have done a good day's work, you have saved your 
soul," she was trembling with eagerness for the 
fulfilment of the decree. 

"Men of the Church," she cried, with sharp 
anxiety in her voice, "lead me to your prison. 
Let me be no longer in the hands of the English !" 

Alas! it was not to be so. The representatives 
of English prejudice and French injustice had 
already agreed that she should not thus escape. 
*'Take her back whence you brought her," com- 
manded Cauchon, and with that the Maid knew 
that her abjuration had been made in vain. 

175 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

Broken in spirit, she was led back to that 
dismal cell, to the fetters, to the odious company 
of her gaolers; and when some of her judges visited 
her that afternoon, bringing with them a peasant 
maiden 's dress, she meekly accepted it. 

Three dreadful days followed that sad Thursday; 
and then news was brought to Cauchon that she had 
returned to her boy's garb. The news was by no 
means unexpected. The change of attire had been 
the outward sign of her submission, and the English, 
either with or without his help, had their ways and 
means of securing a 'relapse.' When some of her 
judges hastened to the prison to find out the truth, 
the men-at-arms drove them back, refusing entrance. 
They had not completely worked their will upon 
the Maid. 

When at length Cauchon and some others obtained 
entrance to the dungeon, they found her in boy's 
attire, " her face wet with tears, disfigured, and out- 
raged." Asked why she had gone back to this, she 
said evasively "that it was more convenient to wear 
men's dress among men, and the promise that she 
should receive the Sacrament and be released from 
her irons had been broken." 

Then the vehement voice began to quaver into a 
bitter wail. 

"I would rather die than remain in irons. If you 
will release me and let me go to Mass and lie in a 
gentle prison, I will be good and do all that the 
Church desires." 

Bit by bit, when the Bishop had departed, the 
cruel tale came out, a tale of insult and torment 
at the hands of the English men-at-arms, who, when 

176 



The Abjuration of Jeanne 

she tried to rise, took away her woman's dress and 
left her nothing but that she had given up. But 
there was no more heat, no more indignation; she 
was full of a sadness, almost of resignation, that at 
once attracted the attention of her judges. 

Cauchon asked her suddenly if she had heard her 
Voices since the day of her 'Abjuration'; and she 
answered quietly, "Yes." They demanded to know 
what they had said; and she replied with the same 
sad resignation "that God had sent word by St 
Catherine and St Margaret how great was the pity 
there was in heaven that I had consented to the 
treason of abjuring to save my life: and that I had 
condemned my soul." 

"Did your Voices tell you what you would do on 
Thursday .f*" 

"They bade me answer the preacher boldly on 
that day"; and she adds with a flash of the old 
brave Jeanne, "I call that preacher a false man, 
for he said many things of me that I never did." 

"Have the Voices reproached you for your 
abjuration.?" 

"They told me that it was great wickedness to 
confess that I had not well done. I said what I did 
for fear of the fire." 

Finally, in answer to further questions, she made 
it absolutely clear that she rejected, once and for all, 
her forced 'Abjuration.' 

"I have done nothing against God or the Faith, 
whatever you may have made me revoke: and as 
for what was in that document of abjuration, I did 
not understand it. 

"If you that are my judges will put me in a safe 
177 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

place, I will again wear my woman's dress; for the 
rest I will do nothing." 

It was more than enough; and the bishops 
hurried away to arrange with the assessors for the 
final scene. 

After a brief discussion, a citation was drawn 
up, .calling upon the Maid to appear before them 
the next day at eight o'clock, in the Old Market- 
place of Rouen to undergo her sentence. This was 
handed to Massieu to be given to her on the morning 
of the day of execution. 

The grim story goes on to say that, as the Bishop 
of Beauvais emerged from the chapel after these 
arrangements had been made, the Earl of Warwick 
hastened to meet him and to learn the latest news. 
Whereupon the Bishop, greeting him with much 
satisfaction, was heard to say, "Make good cheer! 
The thing is done!" 



178 




Oui, mes Voix etaient 
de Dieu, mes Voix ne 
m'ont pas trompee! 

(Jeanne's words on the scaffold) 

CHAPTER XVIII: In Rouen 

Market-place. 30/^ May 

'RY early on the morning of the 30th May 
a certain Friar Martin entered the girl's 
cell with the fatal message. Massieu, as 
we know, was to have delivered it; perhaps his 
heart, ever tender toward his young charge, failed 
him at the last. 

The Maid, roughly awakened by the friar's 
entrance, heard what he had to say, and forthwith 
broke down in a most natural outburst of grief. 
She loved her life as much as most girls of nineteen; 
what marvel is it that on this bright May morning 
she had no mind to die.^* She wept sorely, crying 
out: 

"Alas, am I to be so horribly and cruelly treated .^^ 
Alas, that my body, whole and entire, which has 
ever been kept in purity, should to-day be consumed 
and burnt to ashes! Ah, I would far rather have 
my head cut off, seven times over, than be thus burnt! 
Had I been in the prison of the Church to which I 
submitted myself, and guarded by the Clergy instead 
of by mine enemies, it would not have fallen out so 
unhappily for me. I appeal to God, the great judge, 
for the evils and injustice done me." 

The friar strove, charitably enough, to soothe 
her and prepare her for her end, and presently a 

179 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

great calm of sadness fell upon her, and "in most 
humble and contrite fashion" she received at length 
the Sacraments for which she had hungered and 
thirsted so long. 

Even at that supreme moment they could not 
leave her in peace. One of the 'praying men' who 
was present, declares that, at the moment of the 
administration of the Host, the friar asked her, *'Do 
you believe that this is the Body of Christ?" To 
which she replied, "Yes, and He alone can deliver 
me; I pray you to administer." 

"Do you believe as fully in your Voices.'^" he 
persisted; and she answered, "I believe in God, 
but not in my Voices, for they have deceived me." 

For the moment it seemed indeed as though the 
steadfast spring of hope and faith had run dry, for 
she admitted the same to Cauchon, when that 
prelate hurried, with indecent haste, to see her in 
her forlorn condition. 

"So, Jeanne, you see now your Voices have not 
delivered you and that they have deceived you. 
Tell us now the truth." 

To which she answered very sadly, "Yes, I see 
they have indeed deceived me." Then with a flash 
of her old fiery spirit, she turns upon him with: 

"Bishop, 'tis through you I die! For this I 
summon you before God!" 

Perhaps one of those who lingered after the Bishop 
had departed looked with some kindness on the poor 
child, for she said to him, "Ah, sir, where shall I 
be to-night?" 

He had condemned her but lately as an obstinate 
heretic, but now he answered, not as a prejudiced 

1 80 



In Rouen Market-place 

judge, but as a man in whose heart charity was not 
yet dead: 

"Have you not good faith in your Lord?" 

To which she rephed fervently, "Ah yes, God 
helping me, I shall be in Paradise." 

They arrayed her in the long white shift of the 
penitent, and placed upon her head a mitre, inscribed 
with the words, "Heretic, Relapsed, Apostate, 
Idolater," and thus they led her out to die. Massieu 
and the friar who had been with her in the prison 
sat beside her in the car, drawn by four horses, 
that was to take her to the Market-place. 

She wept, like the child she was, as she saw the 
gay world of Rouen glittering in the bright May 
sunshine, the crowds that thronged around the car, 
the tower of the cathedral in the distance. "Rouen, 
Rouen, is it here I must die?" they heard her sob; 
and again, as the car creaked forward on its way, 
"Rouen, Rouen, I fear that you shall yet suffer 
because of this!" 

They could not even let her die in peace. She 
was made to mount one of three scaffolds, on the 
second of which stood her judges, and on the third 
a mass of plaster, on which stood the faggots and 
the stake. There, in full sight of the hostile crowd, 
was fastened a great placard recounting the reasons 
for her condemnation; and there she was made to 
stand and listen to another sermon full of swelling 
words and harsh invective. 

Those who stood nearest to her — probably Massieu 
and the friar — bear witness that the Maid paid 
no attention to all this, but "knelt on the platform, 
showing great signs and appearance of contrition, 

i8i 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

so that all those who looked upon her wept. She 
called on her knees upon the Blessed Trinity, the 
blessed and glorious Virgin Mary, and all the blessed 
Saints of Paradise. She begged right humbly also 
the forgiveness of all sorts and conditions of men, 
both of her own party and of her enemies; asking 
them for their prayers, forgiving them for the evil 
they had done her." 

Even the hard-hearted Bishops of Winchester 
and Beauvais wept; the waiting crowd shed 'hot 
tears' at the pitiful sight; but some of the brutal 
English soldiers cried out in impatience, "Priests, 
do you want to make us dine here.'^" 

"Do your duty!" said Cauchon to the execu- 
tioner, and forthwith the Maid was led to the 
third scaffold and told to mount to the stake. Was 
it then or earlier that the loud, pitiful cry rang over 
the upturned heads below? 

"St Michael! St Michael! St Michael, help!" 

Before the executioner bound her to the stake, 
Jeanne asked earnestly for a cross. Maitre Massieu 
asked the Clerk of the Church of St Saviour, close by, 
to fetch the Church Cross, and, meantime, an English 
soldier, evidently much touched at sight of her 
suffering, broke his baton and fastened the two pieces 
together cross-wise. This she received with tears 
of joy and put at once into her breast. When the 
Church Cross was brought, says Massieu, "she 
embraced it closely and long, and kept it till she was 
fastened to the stake." 

Even then he held it up close before her that her 
dying eyes might rest upon the figure of her Crucified 
Lord; till she, ever mindful of others, bade him 

182 




"IX ROUEN :MAUKET-1'LACE"— Pa.ye 1S2 



In Rouen Market-place 

withdraw a little lest the fire should catch his robes. 

The flames shot up, the thick black smoke hid 
that white figure, that sweet upturned face from 
the watching crowd below. 

Suddenly from the midst of the awful silence her 
voice rang out, sweet and clear as in the old days 
when storming a redoubt or leading a forlorn hope : 

"My Voices were of God! They have not de- 
ceived me!" 

Once again they heard her speak. 

"Jesus! Jesus!" 

And with that cry of perfect recognition, of purest 
joy, the soul of the White Maid of France passed to 
the gates of Paradise. 

They found, the brave heart untouched by the fire, 
but this, together with her ashes, was thrown into 
the Seine, "for the English feared that some might 
believe she had escaped." 

From the moment of her martyrdom the tide of 
popular opinion began to turn; and one, Maitre 
Tressart, lamented to a fellow-citizen as they left 
the spot: 

"We are all lost; we have burnt a Saint!" 

Nearly five hundred years later, the verdict of 
the Catholic Church, speaking by the lips of Pope 
Pius X, ratified those very words; for in the year 
1909, in St Peter's at Rome, the Maid of France 
was declared to be one of that noble company whom 
for all generations men shall call Blessed. 



183 



Jeanne hrille comme un 
nouveau astre destine 
etre la gloire non seule- 
ment de la France, mais 
de V Eglise Universelle. 

(Declaration of Pius X) 

CHAPTER XIX: In After- 
days. 1432— 1909 

LET us talce a brief glance at the condition of 
affairs in France while the weary months of 
the Maid's trial were dragging along. 

At the moment the English had gained possession 
of the Maid, things were going very badly with 
them and with their Burgundian allies. We have 
seen how Burgundy had failed to take Compiegne. 
Another town of that district was also able to defy 
him, and when Saintrailles, a French captain, offered 
him battle in the open field, he felt it wise to 
refuse. 

With the English, things were going still worse. 
Instead of taking fresh towns, one city after another, 
even those in the neighbourhood of Anglo-Burgundian 
Paris, expelled the English and went over to the side 
of Charles. 

It was as though the spirit of the Maid were still 
at work, though her girlish body lay fast fettered 
in her cell. 

To improve the parlous position of the English, 
the Bishop of Winchester had two plans afoot. 
By the trial of Jeanne d'Arc he hoped utterly to 
discredit the cause of the French King by showing 

184 



In After-days 



that he had been under the influence all the time 
of witchcraft. 

By the coronation of the child Henry, "King of 
France and England," he hoped to strengthen the 
cause of England by leaving no doubt in the mind 
of disaffected France as to who was their lawful 
and anointed sovereign. 

How far the first plan succeeded we have seen 
enough to guess. That even the English soldiers 
were impressed by the innocence of Jeanne is clear; 
that an immense reaction in her favour took place 
in the minds of the French all over the land is 
clearer still. Not only in Rouen was the terrifying 
rumour whispered, "We are lost; we have burnt 
a Saint." 

Possibly the whole position might have been 
worked round in favour of England now, had there 
been presented to France a hero-king, a prince of 
chivalry, such as the Black Prince of former days, 
or the Henry of Agincourt. 

But there was nothing whatever to stir the 
sentiment of the nation in the little pale-faced 
Henry VI, timid, nervous, brow-beaten by my 
Lord of Warwick, trembling before Monseigneur of 
Winchester. 

When the Coronation took place at Paris in the 
December before the trial of the Maid, not a single 
Frenchman of note was present. Even the Bishop 
of Paris was not asked to officiate in his own 
cathedral of Notre-Dame, but the ceremony was 
carried out by the English Cardinal, and, according 
to English usage, "to the great scandal of the 
cathedral chapter." At the Coronation banquet 

185 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

the great French merchants were "left to stand in 
the mud at the palace gate." 

This was not the way to make a king popular 
among a people already sighing for a sovereign of 
their own race. After this fiasco of a ceremony, 
curiously enough, the little King was brought back 
from Paris to London by way of Rouen, where he 
was lodged for a brief period in the Castle, not far 
from where Jeanne was lying in her dungeon. 

We remember that she "said she had no wish to 
see him," but one can but conjecture with interest 
what would have been the character of an interview 
between the bravest of Maids and the most faint- 
hearted of boys. 

The next step in the downfall of English power in 
France was the breaking of the Burgundian alliance. 
The bluff Duke was not pleased to find himself on 
the losing side; the many blunders of the English 
captains in the battle-field had bred contempt in 
his mind for his allies; the secret marriage of the 
Duke of Bedford, a man of fifty, with a young girl 
of seventeen, daughter of one of the Duke's vassals, 
did not draw the links closer, but since Burgundy's 
permission had not been asked, almost led to an open 
rupture. Neither would meet the other or give way 
to the other. 

Meantime the House of Anjou, to which family 
belonged the wife of the true King of France, was 
rallying to the help of Charles. Rene, the 'good 
duke,' brother-in-law of the King, was intent on 
winning the friendship of Burgundy; if that were 
gained the spectacle of a united France was within 
sight. For Paris, groaning under the rule of Cauchon 



In After-days 



and his bishops, was more than wilHng to expel 
them and the EngHsh at one blow; and Normandy, 
head-quarters of the Anglo-French party, was weary 
of a war that was working her destruction, and 
more than ready to make peace. 

Then a worse blow than the tyranny of Cauchon 
fell upon the capital, which was visited by a famine 
and a pestilence that sent Bedford in flight from 
its neighbourhood. 

By the year 1435, three years after the death of 
the Maid, a Congress held at Arras strove to bring 
about some agreement that would end the war. 

When he saw that this involved the loss of the 
French crown, Bedford withdrew from all negotia- 
tions, withdrew to die a few weeks later in the Castle 
of Rouen whence he had seen the Maid come out to 
meet her death. 

The May of the next year saw the reconciliation 
between Charles and Burgundy complete, and the 
gates of Paris opening to receive their own legitimate 
sovereign. 

For fifteen years more the English were to drag 
on a useless and hopeless war, until, driven from 
France in dishonour, they returned at the call of 
their own country, to plunge into that almost equally 
futile struggle known as the Wars of the Roses. 

Meantime, what honour was France paying to 
the memory of the Maid whose wonderful skill 
had turned the tide of affairs and brought them, 
five years after her death, to this point of vantage ? 

In the year 1433, in an Assembly of the Three 
Estates (the French Parliament), held at Blois to 
return thanks to God "for the miraculous successes 

187 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

of Charles VII," not a single mention is made of 
Jeanne d'Arc; the honour is ascribed solely "to a 
little company of valiant men to whom God had 
given courage to undertake the cause." 

Only in Metz and Compifegne the soldier-citizens 
mourned the memory of their brave young leader, 
and at Orleans, the scene of her first triumph, they 
kept the yearly anniversary of her martyrdom in the 
Church of St Sauxon, "burning tapers, with shields 
of her arms attached to them, and great flambeaux 
of wax, while eight monks of the four mendicant 
orders sang masses for the repose of her soul." 

But the King, that unworthy object of her unfail- 
ing loyalty and respect, never seems to have even 
remembered her, far less to have spoken in vindica- 
tion of the cruel slanders passed upon her. She had 
defended him on the scaffold itself : he never troubled 
to say one word on her behalf when it would have 
cost him nothing at all. 

In the year 1448 almost the only district remain- 
ing to the English was Normandy, of which the 
Duke of Somerset was governor. After a year's 
desultory fighting, the troops of Charles VII, under 
Jeanne's old friend and comrade Dunois, attacked 
and seized Rouen. In the November of that year 
1449 the King took up his residence in the ancient 
Norman city, and there for the first time his thoughts 
seemed to have turned to the memory of the brave 
young Maid who had saved France for him at a 
moment when it seemed wholly lost. 

Did the spirit of the White Maid haunt the walls 
of that gloomy castle where her King was lodged ^ 
Did her voice cry out to him from the stones of the 



In After-days 



Market-place where she had laid down her innocent 
life? 

We cannot answer these questions; all we know 
is that the recreant prince issued orders that an 
inquiry be held concerning the circumstances of 
her death. 

This inquiry brought to light not only Massieu, 
her unwilling and disapproving warder, but 1 'Advenu, 
the friar who had given her the last sacraments, 
and Brother Isambard, who had seen her cling to 
the cross while dying the death of a heretic. The 
report of the trial, as made by Manchon, was un- 
earthed, and the form of the whole proceeding 
proved to be illegal. Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, 
had gone, ten years before, to answer for his sins 
before the judgment seat at which the Maid in her 
last hours had arraigned him; but a number of her 
judges were brought forward, who could only lamely 
plead that what they had done amiss they had done 
for fear of the English. 

This was more than enough ground on which to 
base a plea for a formal revision of the whole trial; 
but even this, when it was gained from Rome, was 
obtained not by the energies of the King, but at the 
instance of the Maid 's mother, Isambeau d 'Arc and 
her two brothers, Pierre and Jean. 

Pathetic in the extreme was the opening scene 
of the trial in Notre-Dame, Paris, when the old and 
broken peasant woman, in a voice choked with tears, 
made her mother 's plea for her famous daughter. 

She had brought up her child in the fear of God, 
she said, and in the traditions of the Church. Her 
daughter had never meditated anything against the 



The Story of Jeanne d'^Arc 

Faith; yet her enemies had accused her, and, without 
lawful authority, had brought her to an infamous 
death. 

And when she broke down, and her two sons 
took up the plea, so many of those present joined in 
the petition that "at last it seemed that one great 
cry for justice broke from the multitude." 

So the second trial was ordered, the outcome 
of which may be summarized in the words of one 
who had described her brief life-work from the time 
she first left home. "A beautiful life, and it would 
be impossible for a man to utter one word against 
her." 

The first trial was declared to be null and void, 
and the judgment unjust. "The deeds of the 
Maid are worthy of admiration rather than of con- 
demnation." 

Forthwith two solemn processions of 'Rehabilita- 
tion ' were ordered, one to the churchyard of St Ouen, 
the scene of the false 'abjuration,' the second to 
the market-place "where Jeanne was cruelly and 
horribly burnt and suffocated by fire." On the 
place of her execution was raised 'a cross to her 
perpetual memory.' 

Thus was the innocence of the Maid set forth 
before the world. But this was merely an act of 
justice, a negative admission rather than a positive 
act of honour. More than four centuries were to 
pass before the saintly character of Jeanne and the 
true nature of her divine revelations were openly 
recognized; and then came that wonderful act of 
honour paid to her by the Catholic Church, known 
as the Beatification of Jeanne d 'Arc. This ceremony 

190 



In After-days 



took place on the 18th April 1909, in the Church 
of St Peter, at Rome, where Jeanne was solemnly 
declared by Pope Pius X to "shine as a new star 
destined to be the glory not only of France, but 
also of the whole Church." 



Like a story from some old book, that battle of long ago: 
Shadows the poor French King, and the might of his English foe; 
Shadows the charging nobles, and the archers kneeling a-row — 
But a flame in my heart and my eyes, the Maid with her banner 
of snow! 



191 




ILLUSTRATE 
CAMPAIGN.&C 



I 



